The Right Path: Meredith O'Rourke // INFLUENCE Magazine

The Right Path: Meredith O'Rourke // INFLUENCE Magazine

INFLUENCE Magazine assigned us to photograph Meredith O'Rourke for a feature in their Fall 2025 issue. The story, written by Brendan Farrington, was a career profile, and our assignment took us to the White House in Washington, D.C. for a portrait session at the Rose Garden and the South Lawn.

There's no way to overstate what it means to photograph at the White House. It is one of the most secure, most recognizable, and most visually significant locations in the world, and the opportunity to work there for an editorial assignment is rare. Everything about the session is shaped by the setting: the security protocols, the access windows, the coordination with White House staff, and the reality that you are working in a space where every element carries weight. As editorial photographers in Florida, we've worked in a wide range of high-profile locations, but the White House is in a category of its own.

The Rose Garden and the South Lawn are outdoor environments, which means the photography is driven by natural light and the conditions of the day. We still brought our Profoto lights to provide a more controlled environment. We used our Canon mirrorless system and Canon lenses to frame O'Rourke within the iconic landscape of the White House grounds, finding compositions that connected the subject to the setting while keeping the portrait as the focal point.

Photographing on the White House grounds also means working within a compressed time window. Access is scheduled precisely, and there's no flexibility to extend the session or come back for a second pass. You arrive with a plan, you execute it efficiently, and you deliver. That kind of discipline is something we've developed through years of political portrait photography at the Florida Capitol and in Washington, D.C., where working around the schedules of busy public figures is the norm. The White House takes that to another level.

What we value about an assignment like this is that it represents the full arc of our work as a Washington D.C. photographer serving Florida-based publications. The connection between Tallahassee and Washington runs through so much of what we do for INFLUENCE Magazine, and being trusted to photograph at the White House for a Florida publication is something we don't take for granted.

This feature was photographed by The Workmans for INFLUENCE Magazine and appeared in the Fall 2025 issue and was written by Brendan Farrington. The Workmans are a husband-and-wife photography team based in Tallahassee, Florida, and we work with publications across the state of Florida, in Washington D.C. and around the United States. You can explore more of our editorial photography in the archive, see more of our work across our website and connect with us on how we can best serve you!