Adam Scotti has served as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s official photographer since 2013.
I first ran into Justin Trudeau in 2010 at a model UN event at McGill University, where I was a student. His assistant asked if I would be interested in taking photos on a volunteer basis for their office. A year later, while writing my final exams, I extended that volunteer work to help out on the 2011 federal campaign.
By 2012, I’d established a good relationship with the “Boss,” and during a drive between events in Montreal, he told me he would be running for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Each step seemed to lead to the next until I found myself as official photographer to the Prime Minister.
During a flight to Vancouver on Aug. 2, 2015, a flight attendant passes a note from the cockpit with the news that then-prime minister Stephen Harper had called an election.
Dashing past a prom group during a run along Vancouver’s seawall on May 19, 2017.
It wasn’t what I’d set out to do, despite the fact my father did the same job for Brian Mulroney. Fifteen years after my first assignment with Justin, more than 45 countries and more than a million photos later, here we are at the end.
The photographer’s role in the Prime Minister’s office is that of a visual archivist. Every meeting, every trip, every event attended gets documented. Some days are thrilling, and others are painfully repetitive – but the pace was always relentless.
Having dinner with former U.S. president Barack Obama in Montreal on June 6, 2017.
Helping adviser Patrick Travers tie his shoes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Feb. 10, 2020.
There is sort of a mental checklist you go through in documenting a day, framing each one as its own story and each event as a chapter of that story. Hopefully you capture people’s personalities or moods, which can help explain the decisions they make.
These photos offer a glimpse of the person I saw show up to work each day and the work my colleagues did. Despite the schedule demands and the enormous weight of the decisions being made, we still managed to share some lighter moments along the way.
Playing peekaboo with son Hadrien in the Prime Minister’s Office on March 11, 2017.
Warming up lunch at Rideau Cottage on Jan. 7, 2021.
All the photos from our visual team will be handed over to Library and Archives Canada at the end of the mandate, with the goal of making them accessible to researchers and the wider public in the coming years.
I often remind myself that every day is a privilege to do what I do, no matter the day. History is history and I am lucky enough to say that I was in the thick of it for the last 15 years.
The prime minister-designate walks up the stairs on his way to his office on Oct. 20, 2015, in Centre Block during his first day back in Ottawa after the election.