First Cameraman: Documenting the Obama Presidency in Real Time, is a first-person account of the first official staff White House videographer, Arun Chaudhary. One wishes that the book lived up to its previews.
Obama campaign new media director Joe Rospars recruited author Arun Chaudhary, telling him that the Obama campaign wanted to "up the ante" by using different skills from non-political fields. The political experience of any prospect was not as important as their technical expertise and innovation. This may well have just been a nice way of saying that the campaign was a bit desperate and was willing to try something different.
Chaudhary himself notes in an aside that the bulk of the experienced political media people went with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards that year, so looking outside the box made some sense if one was to have any chance of winning. That this did work, in spite of a campaign management that had no clue what to do with this "new media" they drafted, should have been the story of this book
What First Cameraman is not is a book about Obama as Chaudhary saw and interacted with him. There isn't much about Obama the Candidate, and there is even less about Obama the President. There is little about things Obama said or did at campaign events, outside of a couple of short comments made to Chaudhary by Obama regarding the camera, and Obama's regular reluctance to sit in front of it for extended periods.
For a man whose job was to film Obama "around the clock for four years", the subject of the effort barely escapes the cutting room floor. The author offers more interaction vignettes with the Secret Service detail than he does the protected person.
Was Chaudhary even watching Obama while looking through the viewfinder? There are occasionally a few interesting quips attributed to the candidate/president, mostly gathered when the camera was idle, but not enough to satisfy an avid Obama researcher.
First Cameraman is also not about the campaign itself, nor much about Chaudhary's role with it. While Chaudhary supplied the advertising team with some campaign video footage, he did not participate in the award-winning mass media campaign (see here and here for more on these awards). That wasn't his assignment. He was expected to reach out with his videos to the Internet users, those now designated by the media and both parties as the "social media".
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