Washington: Arun Chaudhary is the White House's ultimate fly on the wall.
Perpetually clad in New Balance sneakers and suits that are just slightly askew, he dashes in and out of meetings, from East Room news conferences to the Oval Office and back again, out through the South Portico and into the White House vegetable garden -- all while scrambling to blend into the background and record nearly every moment with his video camera.
One recent Tuesday, he trained his lens on President Obama, who was admiring the paintings on the wall of the Green Room as he waited to speak at a community college summit meeting.
"Arun's a very cool guy, though I have to tell him to get a haircut every once in a while," Mr Obama quipped, nodding over at Mr Chaudhary before walking out to the stage.
Mr Chaudhary is the official White House videographer and the first person to hold the job, a part documentarian, part White House-message-machine post. He travels with the President on roughly two-thirds of his trips, documenting the behind-the-scenes occasions and public theatrics.
He pulls his video together into "West Wing Week," a signature production that comes out on the White House Web site every Friday and offers a pithy look at the President's past week. Mr Chaudhary, 35, serves as reporter and promoter, and last week, when Democrats suffered crushing defeats in the midterms, was especially tough. Mr Chaudhary stuck to fairly innocuous clips -- talk of "bipartisan solutions" and how to "move the country forward" -- and never overtly mentioned the president's self-described electoral "shellacking."
The role of the White House photographer is well known -- half historian and half propagandist, shooting generally flattering photographs of the President that are released into the world. And since at least the time of President Ronald Reagan, successive White Houses have understood the power of video, investing time and effort into creating images for television to record.
But Obama aides have gone a step further, creating imagery and then filming it themselves, knowing they can inject it into the media bloodstream because of video-sharing sites like YouTube and the increased appetite for new media and technology.
"It's about explaining issues and communicating the president's positions and agenda in as many ways as we can to make it accessible to anyone who's interested," said Macon Phillips, the director of new media at the White House.
The goal is twofold -- to engage the people who come to the White House Web site looking for information about the administration, and more important, to lure people who would not normally visit the government's home page.
"What's interesting in life is the transition between two things," Mr Chaudhary said, explaining his fascination with private moments about to become public, like the President's greeting foreign leaders just outside the Oval Office. "Whether you are in the United Nations or a castle in Prague, anything can happen, and probably will, in the hallway."
The videos, which come out of both the new media and the photography offices, can be as varied as Austan D. Goolsbee, a top economic adviser to the president, explaining the Bush-era tax cuts with the help of a white board, and a phone call between Mr. Obama and Gail O'Brien, a cancer survivor helped by the new health care legislation.
They are also carefully geared toward their audience -- the new media shop might team up with WebMD, a health Web site, to promote an online chat with Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary.
Even though Mr Chaudhary got his start shooting video for the campaign, he said he sees his job as documenting this administration for history.
"When people in 20 years see the work that I do, I hope they'll have a greater understanding of what the President is like personally and what the presidency is like as an institution," Mr Chaudhary said. "I'm hoping these moments I've saved and put out will even have a richer and more historical flavor."
For instance, the video he shot of Mr Obama and Elena Kagan, making bad jokes right before he officially nominated her to the Supreme Court? "What if that had been LBJ and Thurgood Marshall?" Mr Chaudhary said. "In 20 years, that will be amazing."
Every video that comes out must first be approved by the press office, and while the White House says it is not trying to supplant the news media, the line can get blurry, especially when news shows use what are essentially video news releases. The video of the call between Mr Obama and the cancer survivor found its way onto "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC and a segment of ABC's "World News With Diane Sawyer."
"It is a little disconcerting to think we're going to have these tools that are so powerful in the hands of the people who also happen to be the most powerful people in the country," said Nancy Scola, the associate editor of techPresident, a blog that covers technology and the federal government. "The Obama administration has expanded the use of new media at the same time as it's freezing out old media."
Others say the White House is not doing enough. But fellow photographers and cameramen joke that you cannot take a picture of the President without Mr Chaudhary somewhere in the shot.
Some videos are more successful than others, but Mr Chaudhary's "West Wing Week" is a brand name, especially among staff members in the building.
Mr Chaudhary is a former New York University film instructor with an artsy bent, and his operation is a bit ragtag -- just him, his camera and his laptop. For "West Wing Week," he found inspiration in the " '60s New Wave French movie titles," the retro government aesthetic (think green memoranda books), the old newsreels from the early 20th century, "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" ("for that sense of the vaudeville") and "Arrested Development" ("for economy of narration").
He loves what he calls "awkward foreign leader moments," like when Mr Obama tried to make small talk between the president of Chile and the prime minister of the Netherlands, only to discover the two had already met. But his videos also have a serious side, like his "Dispatches From Iraq" piece.
Because of the Presidential Records Act, every piece of video the White House shoots, even the outtakes, is saved on huge storage servers, and will eventually become part of the official record in the presidential library.
"The President could be having a conversation with Reggie about what types of cheese melt better on a sandwich, so it might be a little weird if you just hear that last part about the Muenster," he said, referring to Mr Obama's personal assistant, Reggie Love.
But for Mr Chaudhary, it is just part of a job that he is creating and redefining anew daily. "It's tough being an artist making a living in this town," he joked.
Perpetually clad in New Balance sneakers and suits that are just slightly askew, he dashes in and out of meetings, from East Room news conferences to the Oval Office and back again, out through the South Portico and into the White House vegetable garden -- all while scrambling to blend into the background and record nearly every moment with his video camera.
One recent Tuesday, he trained his lens on President Obama, who was admiring the paintings on the wall of the Green Room as he waited to speak at a community college summit meeting.
Mr Chaudhary is the official White House videographer and the first person to hold the job, a part documentarian, part White House-message-machine post. He travels with the President on roughly two-thirds of his trips, documenting the behind-the-scenes occasions and public theatrics.
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The role of the White House photographer is well known -- half historian and half propagandist, shooting generally flattering photographs of the President that are released into the world. And since at least the time of President Ronald Reagan, successive White Houses have understood the power of video, investing time and effort into creating images for television to record.
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"It's about explaining issues and communicating the president's positions and agenda in as many ways as we can to make it accessible to anyone who's interested," said Macon Phillips, the director of new media at the White House.
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"What's interesting in life is the transition between two things," Mr Chaudhary said, explaining his fascination with private moments about to become public, like the President's greeting foreign leaders just outside the Oval Office. "Whether you are in the United Nations or a castle in Prague, anything can happen, and probably will, in the hallway."
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They are also carefully geared toward their audience -- the new media shop might team up with WebMD, a health Web site, to promote an online chat with Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary.
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"When people in 20 years see the work that I do, I hope they'll have a greater understanding of what the President is like personally and what the presidency is like as an institution," Mr Chaudhary said. "I'm hoping these moments I've saved and put out will even have a richer and more historical flavor."
For instance, the video he shot of Mr Obama and Elena Kagan, making bad jokes right before he officially nominated her to the Supreme Court? "What if that had been LBJ and Thurgood Marshall?" Mr Chaudhary said. "In 20 years, that will be amazing."
Every video that comes out must first be approved by the press office, and while the White House says it is not trying to supplant the news media, the line can get blurry, especially when news shows use what are essentially video news releases. The video of the call between Mr Obama and the cancer survivor found its way onto "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC and a segment of ABC's "World News With Diane Sawyer."
"It is a little disconcerting to think we're going to have these tools that are so powerful in the hands of the people who also happen to be the most powerful people in the country," said Nancy Scola, the associate editor of techPresident, a blog that covers technology and the federal government. "The Obama administration has expanded the use of new media at the same time as it's freezing out old media."
Others say the White House is not doing enough. But fellow photographers and cameramen joke that you cannot take a picture of the President without Mr Chaudhary somewhere in the shot.
Some videos are more successful than others, but Mr Chaudhary's "West Wing Week" is a brand name, especially among staff members in the building.
Mr Chaudhary is a former New York University film instructor with an artsy bent, and his operation is a bit ragtag -- just him, his camera and his laptop. For "West Wing Week," he found inspiration in the " '60s New Wave French movie titles," the retro government aesthetic (think green memoranda books), the old newsreels from the early 20th century, "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" ("for that sense of the vaudeville") and "Arrested Development" ("for economy of narration").
He loves what he calls "awkward foreign leader moments," like when Mr Obama tried to make small talk between the president of Chile and the prime minister of the Netherlands, only to discover the two had already met. But his videos also have a serious side, like his "Dispatches From Iraq" piece.
Because of the Presidential Records Act, every piece of video the White House shoots, even the outtakes, is saved on huge storage servers, and will eventually become part of the official record in the presidential library.
"The President could be having a conversation with Reggie about what types of cheese melt better on a sandwich, so it might be a little weird if you just hear that last part about the Muenster," he said, referring to Mr Obama's personal assistant, Reggie Love.
But for Mr Chaudhary, it is just part of a job that he is creating and redefining anew daily. "It's tough being an artist making a living in this town," he joked.
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