"I want people to think they've been a fly on the wall as they've seen him go through his first couple years as a national politician," said Souza, now an assistant professor  at Ohio University. "I'm just trying to put the reader there so they could experience a little bit of what he went through and how people reacted to him."

Souza, who teaches photojournalism in the Scripps College of Communication's School of Visual Communication, has compiled his breathtaking photographs into "The Rise of Barack Obama," a hardcover book that premiered Sunday on The New York Times Best Sellers list at No. 16.