Permitting a private citizen to use the Rose Garden for a personal event is extraordinarily unusual, and it attests to the deep ties the president and his photographer have forged, as Mr. Souza has shadowed Mr. Obama on virtually every day of his presidency.
Now, though, Mr. Souza’s privileged access — combined with the rise of services like Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, which has allowed the White House to distribute his official photos rapidly to the news media — is generating tension between him and the news photographers who are assigned to the White House.
In a letter two weeks ago to the press secretary, Jay Carney, the White House Correspondents’ Association and other organizations, including The New York Times, protested that the White House routinely excluded news photographers from sessions with the president and then released photographs of the events, usually taken by Mr. Souza.
“You are, in effect, replacing independent journalism with visual press releases,” said the letter, which criticized the White House’s policy as “an arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference in legitimate news-gathering activities.”
At the best of times, the relationship between outside photographers and the White House’s in-house one is fraught: they jostle for the same image of the president, but the official photographer is invariably three steps ahead of them when the president works a rope line or is in the Oval Office for his meeting while they wait outside.
Mr. Souza, a plain-spoken 58-year-old who was a news photographer for The Chicago Tribune before moving to the White House, said he believes that photographers have better access to Mr. Obama than they did to President Ronald Reagan, whom he documented in an earlier stint as a White House photographer.
Still, he said he understood the frustration of the news photographers and has advocated more access for them — to a point. “It’s legitimate for them to push for more access, and in some cases I think their arguments are valid, and in some instances I think their arguments aren’t valid,” Mr. Souza said last week in an interview in his cubbyhole office in the West Wing.
This traditional tug of war has been exacerbated by digital technology, which the White House has exploited to distribute his pictures, often soon after he takes them. That puts Mr. Souza in de facto competition with other photographers since, owing to his access, his photos are sometimes more newsworthy than theirs.
“The core issue is the White House uses his images and disseminates them to the public, and they become the only historical document of events,” said J. David Ake, the assistant bureau chief for photos at The Associated Press.
Doug Mills, a longtime White House photographer for The Times, added: “It’s not about Pete. It’s that we see Pete’s pictures of things that we’re not getting access to, and that’s incredibly frustrating for all the photographers who cover the White House.”
David Hume Kennerly, the official photographer for President Gerald R. Ford, said: “Everybody is trying to come to terms with the impact of social media. I don’t know what the right balance is, but I understand his position in terms of the historical record.”
Indeed, Mr. Souza’s principal job is to document the presidency, and all of his photographs, published and unpublished, are filed in the National Archives.
White House officials say Mr. Souza is being turned into a scapegoat for a press corps frustrated by how technology is upending its business. (The Times, they note, charges clients a service fee for reprinting Mr. Souza’s pictures and sends him royalty checks, which he does not cash.) They also say the public benefits from behind-the-scenes images, like Mr. Souza’s dramatic shot of Mr. Obama and aides watching the raid on Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“When there are decisions to release photos, those are made by the press office,” said the deputy press secretary, Josh Earnest. “We’ve always acknowledged there is a difference between what Pete does and what independent photographers do.”
That difference was evident in the case of the Bin Laden photo, which the White House digitally altered to blur out a classified document on a table in front of Hillary Rodman Clinton, then the secretary of state. Mr. Souza said he tried to get the document declassified to show it in the image, and when his request was rejected, he opted to airbrush it because otherwise the White House would not have released it.
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