Adding to the notion that Sen. Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, he is already the subject of a coffee-table book.”

The Rise of Barack Obama” is 150 pages of quite remarkable photographs by former White House photographer Pete Souza that show Obama in private and public moments.

Souza captures Obama opening Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell in South Africa and Obama conferring with Sen. John McCain on the immigration bill and such behind-the-scene snaps as Obama and his wife, Michelle, waiting to be introduced at Iowa State University.

Souza was an official photographer for President Ronald Reagan and is now an assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University. He is the author of two photographic books on Reagan’s term in office: “Unguarded Moments: Behind-the -Scenes Photographs of President Reagan” (1992) and “Images of Greatness: An Intimate Look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan (2004).

Souza began with Obama’s first day in the U.S. Senate and continued on to the campaign trail before the spring primaries. He accompanied him to seven countries, including Kenya, South Africa and Russia.

“Early into that first year, I began to believe that I was photographing a future president of the United States, and that my pictures might become a historic look at the rise of Sen. Obama’s political career,” Souza wrote in his introduction. “That may sound like an easy statement to make now, but that’s really how I felt at the time.”

Which photo(s) provided the most surprising result and why? Souza was asked in material distributed by his publisher, Triumph Books.

“One of the things that has been fascinating for me to observe during the last three years is how other people react to Obama. Early on, there was this curiosity, where people had heard so much about him but were now checking him out to see if he was for real. You can see that in their faces.

“Then, in Africa, the response to him was overwhelming. He gave a speech in Nairobi, and they couldn’t fit everyone inside the auditorium. So they set up these loudspeakers outside, and I decided to stay outside to photograph the people that were listening to the speech on these loudspeakers. There were hundreds gathered and you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was listening in rapt attention. One man took notes on his hand in blue ink.”