WASHINGTON: For more than four decades a White House tour was a hushed affair, where visitors moved at timed intervals through the executive residence, their cameras in their pockets, taking in portraits of past presidents, the antique furniture and the color of the drapes.

That changed dramatically on Wednesday, when the Obama administration decided not only to allow photos, but encouraged people to share them online.

By the end of the day social media was flooded with quirky images from the White House: a travel blogger in a dinosaur shirt holding up a selfie with a partially rolled-up red carpet in the Cross Hall behind him, a close-up of the brocaded arm of a sofa in the Green Room and bunches of pictures of the first family’s dogs.

The move by the White House was, in part, a practical one; the restrictions had been imposed out of concern that flash photography could damage the White House’s historic artwork, which is no longer a danger in the age of cellphone photography. But it also fit neatly into the administration’s broader effort to inject itself into the social media bloodstream.

Even Michelle Obama’s official announcement on Wednesday about a change in the White House’s camera policy seemed aimed at going viral: on the official Instagram account of her office, the first lady is seen on a 15-second video ripping up a sign prohibiting the taking of photos or the use social media on the White House grounds, as she laughs and makes her own sound effects. The video clip underscored the underlying purpose of the policy shift: in the digital age, virality is the whole point.

The debut of the new policy was carefully scripted: several dozen people with broad followings on Instagram were invited a week ago to come to the White House and took the first tours on which photography was permitted. The Obamas’ dogs, Sunny and Bo, were on hand to pose for guests.

“It was a bit of a surreal experience,” said Zach Glassman, a Brooklyn-based freelance photographer and travel blogger, who has nearly 230,000 followers on his Instagram account. Glassman even had a chance to snuggle with Bo — “He was incredibly soft”— but the group was encouraged to move on. “Naturally, I would have spent quite some time with them.”

Tourists snapped photos of Bo and Sunny, while some of the invited guests took pictures of them photographing the dogs. May-May Horcasitas, a South Beach, Florida resident originally from Hong Kong, took photos on her phone of the first lady’s video detailing the new policy.

“Let me get a shot of that,” she exclaimed.

Under the new rules, phones and compact still cameras with lenses no longer than three inches are allowed: video cameras, cameras with detachable lenses, tablets, tripods, monopods, and camera “selfie” sticks are still off limits. Livestreaming and flash photography are also still banned.

Those constraints did nothing to curb the giddy reaction on social media. The hashtag #WhiteHouseTour took off on Twitter, garnering more than 1,000 mentions by the early afternoon.

White House tours themselves have made a comeback recently. The government suspended the visits in March 2013, saying congressionally-imposed constraints on the Secret Service’s budget made it impossible for them to conduct background checks on so many visitors. The tours resumed on a limited basis in November that year, and roughly 55,000 people took White House tours last year.

But there is little mistaking the importance of social media to this White House. On Wednesday afternoon, while travelling in Nashville, Obama held a virtual town on Twitter. He took questions about health care, expressed firm opposition to peas as a guacamole ingredient and discussed his current taste in music: “was listening to outkast/liberation and the black keys/lonely boy this morning,” he tweeted.

The White House has been working “for quite a while” on lifting the no-cameras policy, according to an aide to the first lady. The White House lifted it a few years ago for its annual holiday tours, the aide added, and it has never applied to guests at the White House’s holiday parties.

And on at least a couple of occasions selfie sticks have made it into the White House: when Obama posed with one for a BuzzFeed video in February, and when the White House hosted an Instagram meetup on March 21, which the president’s official photographer Pete Souza attended.

Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson State University, said the move would likely help visitors bond a little more with what is sometimes called “the People’s House”. She recalled seeing several African-American visitors pose in front of ‘The Builders’, a painting by renowned black painter Jacob Lawrence, which was placed in the Green Room in 2007.

As a museum, Kumar noted, the White House “has significance for people ... In families, these will be pictures that will be treasured”.

The new policy still does not allow tourists to go trooping into the Situation Room or the family’s living quarters. And it does nothing to address the concerns of those who complain that the administration has generally been too secretive in how it governs.

“In the transparency line, this is low-hanging fruit,” Kumar observed.

Tevi Troy, who worked in the White House under George W. Bush and wrote the book, What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House, noted in an email that the dangers of the shift “are probably minimal”, given the fact that the White House has been widely photographed and tourists don’t usually interact with the first family or staff.

Still, it’s tempting for some to imagine what could have happened if tourists were taking photos unfettered through the decades.

“If people had cameras on tours in previous White Houses, perhaps we could have seen women sneaking into see Jack Kennedy, or Dwight Eisenhower trotting out to his putting green,” Troy speculated.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2015

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