Flashback: Revisiting Our 2009 Obama Issue at the End of an Historic Presidency

​Photo: President Barack Obama gives his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago Tuesday night. (AP /Morry Gash)

As our August 2016 issue is our last to be published before the United States elects a new President, we thought it would be timely to spotlight (and make freely available through November) our August 2009 "Obama Issue" as a document of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and early presidency, in which his unique, highly-charged, and often contradictory place in visual culture was already apparent to our contributors.

For the 2009 issue, our Editorial Group sent out a questionnaire which asked questions such as, "Is Barack Obama the most ‘visible’ US president to date, and if so how?"

We published almost two dozen responses to this and other questions about Obama and visual culture, including W.J.T. Mitchell's "Obama as Icon" and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "The Modern Prince... 'to come'?".

We invite everyone to join us in revisiting this issue to look back at presidency that has been virtually inextricable from visuality.