Times Insider

How Our White House Photographer Finds New Angles on the Oval Office

Doug Mills, winner of three Pulitzers, sits, crawls and hoists cameras high in the air to bring viewers fresh perspectives. He was at it again this week during our marathon interview with President Trump.


Doug Mills, left, photographing President Trump after an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Jodi Rudoren Photographs by Doug Mills
Jodi Rudoren, who oversees The Times’s newsletters, visited the Oval Office in 2004 as a political reporter.

Jan. 9, 2026

Doug Mills has been in the Oval Office thousands of times since he started covering the White House in 1983, mostly for rushed and crowded photo ops. He recently photographed virtually every inch of the room in 600 images that our colleagues stitched together to create a 3-D view of the gilded spectacle President Trump has made of it.

But even for Doug, who won his third Pulitzer Prize last year — for pictures of the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump at a campaign event in Pennsylvania — The Times’s nearly two-hour interview with the president this week was extraordinary. He thought he might be asked to leave after 10 or 15 minutes but ended up staying the entire time, including an hourlong off-the-record phone call that President Trump took from the president of Colombia, and an impromptu tour of the residence. At times, Doug sat on the floor to avoid the gaze of the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.

He brought three Sony A1 II camera bodies into the Oval, with a 24-millimeter lens, a 50-millimeter lens and a 135-millimeter lens. Plus a Gitzo monopod that allowed him to hoist a camera (with the 24-millimeter lens) about 15 feet to create a bird’s-eye view — something that has become a Doug Mills signature and that was requested by his editor, Marisa Schwartz Taylor.

He emerged having snapped about 3,700 frames, the first at 5:08 p.m., the last at 8:24, when the tour began (no cameras or cellphones were allowed). He filed 41 of those for editors to choose from. Doug was just outside the White House on Thursday when we talked by phone about the experience. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

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New York Times reporters interviewing Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Jodi Rudoren oversees The Times’s newsletters, including The Morning, DealBook and scores of emails focused on specific topics.

Doug Mills has been a photographer in the Washington bureau of The Times since 2002. He has covered every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan.