SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom has quietly hired a celebrity photographer — who boasts Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as previous clients — to burnish his man-about-the-state image.
Charles Ommanney, a former photojournalist and war photographer who traveled with Newsom to China last fall as a freelancer, was on hand Thursday to capture Newsom in aviator sunglasses, jeans and work gloves, picking up detritus left over from a recently-cleared homeless encampment in Los Angeles County. Late last month, he photographed the governor surveying the damage of the Borel Fire in Kern County.
This week, standing on the edge of a steep river embankment in a bright-white shirt, he pointed his lens at the governor as he collected items left behind in the San Fernando Valley encampment: a shopping cart, skateboard, soiled blankets and tires.
The governor’s office about six months ago named Ommanney its director of photography, a title that comes with a $200,000 per year salary. That makes him among the top earners in the Newsom administration, according to the state controller’s office. The governor, himself, drew a $234,101 salary last year.