White House photo archivist Janet McConnell Philips ’77 has preserved the images of five administrations spanning nearly a quarter century.
Janet McConnell Philips ’77 got one of the first glimpses of the iconic White House image captured inside the Situation Room May 1: President Barack Obama, mouth tense, face full of consternation, sits amid his national security team awaiting news from Abbottabad, Pakistan.
A photograph taken later that evening shows the president in the East Room. The tension is gone. He is in mid-speech. Osama bin Laden, hunted for a decade, is dead, he announces.
Philips sifts through the thousands of daily photographs captured by four White House staff photographers who document a presidency. Some are mundane. Some, like this one, are monumental. Philips takes utmost care with each of them. As the White House photo archivist, she is on the front lines of the record books. She writes the captions and preserves them for the ages.
Philips has held this role through five administrations, beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1988. Her road to the White House began at Mary Washington.
Philips never imagined this life as a child growing up in Connecticut. Mary Washington did not seem so far-fetched. In her teens, Philips accompanied her mother, Barbara- Ann “Bobbie” Hough McConnell ’48, to class reunions.
“The women were really sharp. Really fun,” Philips said of her mother’s classmates. “I wore my mom’s college ring all the way through high school.”
Mary Washington felt like home from the start.
“I have an incredible respect for the education I got there,” Philips said.
She loved the picturesque campus, the intimacy of small classes.
Philips intended to major in art history. She chose religion after taking a class taught by David Cain, distinguished professor of classics, philosophy, and religion, and went on to receive a master’s degree from Catholic University. “He made a powerful impression on me. I took every class he offered,” Philips said of Cain. “He’s a great lecturer. He just made you think.”
While a student at Mary Washington, she visited the nation’s capital every chance she got. “Anytime they had a bus going, I would get on it.” By the time she graduated, her mind was made up: “I headed to Washington with a suitcase and kind of made my way.”
Philips worked for a decade as a photo librarian at The Washington Post before landing in the White House. In the years since, she has watched technology evolve from film and fax machines to digital imagery and Flickr, a photo sharing website the White House uses so the rest of the world can get an up-close view of the daily life of the president and first lady.
“People say, ‘You’ve done the same thing for 23 years,’ ” Philips said. But, “it’s always stimulating. It’s always different.”
In 1995, President Bill Clinton asked to hold Philips’ son, Will, outside the West Wing, and the rest is photo history. Philips hopes her son will carry on the Mary Washington tradition started by her mother, Bobbie Hough McConnell ’48. Photo by Bob McNeely
Soon after the birth of her son, Will, in 1994, Philips brought him to the West Wing, where they encountered then-President Bill Clinton and an entourage of Secret Service agents.
The entourage eyed her. The president walked up and began a conversation.
“He just talked to me for like five minutes, and then said, ‘Do you think he’d come to me?’ And I just handed him over. I have the coolest picture of President Clinton holding my son,” Philips said.
Recently, she drove him by her alma mater. “I’m hoping my son will go there, too,” she said. “I keep pushing Mary Washington.”