ABSTRACT
This chapter claims that the importance of the private lives of American political leaders in the public perception originates with the values and ideologies of the American Revolution. Analysing the visual aesthetics of staged privacy of the American political elite, it traces the deeply rooted convictions represented in these images and how such pictures impact the political culture of the United States as well as the interaction of politics and the media? Furthermore, it examines the transatlantic influence of the visual aesthetics of privacy by scrutinizing a number of examples demonstrating a high degree of Americanization of European, and especially German political culture, albeit in a highly different ideological framework.
