The Power of Being of Service: What David Valdez’s Career Actually Teaches About Building a Personal Brand

David Valdez stood close enough to touch the President of the United States for four years, camera in hand, and the story he’s proudest of is the one where he chose not to take the picture.

Valdez was the Chief Official White House Photographer for President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, after four years as Bush’s personal photographer when he was vice president. He shot roughly 65,000 rolls of film. He’s traveled to 75 countries. He is one of only thirteen people in American history to hold that job, and he is now the founder of the Texas Photography Festival in Georgetown, Texas, which drew 1,400 photographers this past year. None of that is the reason people remember him.

The Photo He Didn’t Take

In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch. President Reagan sent Vice President Bush to Florida that same day to meet the astronauts’ families. Valdez flew down with him. Walking toward the room where those families were waiting, he asked Bush a direct question: did he want the room photographed.

Bush didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He looked at Valdez and let him decide.

Valdez put the camera down. He walked into that room empty-handed, because the people in it had done nothing to earn being photographed in the worst moment of their lives. Decades later, he still isn’t fully sure it was the right call. He is certain it was the respectful one. He told me the whole world already felt exactly what those families felt. There was nothing a photograph could add. There was only something it could take.

That single decision tells you more about how Valdez built a career, and a name, than any of his thirteen-in-history credentials do.

The Career Nobody Would Predict From the Resume

Here’s what’s strange about talking to a man who spent four years fifteen feet from the most powerful office on earth: he barely brings it up unless you ask. What he brings up, unprompted, is that he washes dishes every Monday at Crest View Baptist Church in Georgetown, alongside three or four other guys, for 600 college students who show up for a free lunch. People ask him about it. You went from the White House to washing dishes? He doesn’t see it as a fall. He sees it as the same thing he was always doing, just without a camera in his hand.

He’s built homes with Habitat for Humanity in Ghana and Canada. He was in Washington, D.C. doing a Habitat build on September 11, 2001. He photographs deploying service members for the USO. He volunteers with a therapeutic horseback riding program for veterans. He was recognized as a national Daily Point of Light, a program President Bush founded from that line in his inaugural address about “a thousand points of light.” Valdez is somewhere around recipient eight thousand three hundred. He’ll tell you that number almost as an afterthought, because counting isn’t the point of the thing.

Here’s the part that should stop you if you run a business, a team, or a brand: Valdez says he made it a rule, every time he had the power to hire a photographer, to hire someone better than himself. Not equal. Better. So he’d keep learning. Susan Biddle, Carol Powers, Mike Sargent, Joyce Naltchayan, all photographers he brought onto his White House staff, all of whom kept building careers that outlasted his own tenure. One of his interns from his Disney years is now a featured speaker at the Eddie Adams Workshop. Another won a World Press Photo award and shoots for Mercedes-Benz. He opened doors he never asked anyone to hold open for him in return.

The Dancing Chicken

When Valdez talks about the Texas Photography Festival, the event he founded, he calls himself “the dancing chicken.” His words. He’s the one who draws the crowd. Then his team, led by CEO Julie Copenhaver, takes over and runs the show, and he says flatly that he gets all the credit for their work. That’s not false modesty. That’s a strategy. You cannot build something that outlasts you if you insist on being the only person standing in the spotlight.

I’ve spent thirty years teaching businesses that the customer is the hero of the story and the brand is the guide. Valdez never read a persuasion textbook. He arrived at the same principle from the opposite direction, standing next to presidents, prime ministers, and dictators, learning that the moment you make yourself the story, you’ve already lost the thing that made you worth remembering.

Watch how it shows up in the small details he mentions almost in passing. He photographed a Soviet military funeral in Red Square, standing with Margaret Thatcher and Fidel Castro, and caught the widow of a Soviet leader making the sign of the cross in a country that had spent seventy years outlawing religion. He was in the Kremlin when Mikhail Gorbachev pulled Bush down a side hallway to show him a chapel the Soviets had secretly preserved. He heard, thirty years after the fact, from a former Soviet soldier in a church in Georgetown, Texas, that Bush’s decision not to claim victory at the fall of the Berlin Wall, “it’s not our victory, it’s their victory, let them celebrate,” may have kept a rogue general from launching missiles. Valdez had photographed the man telling him this story decades earlier. The soldier had carried that photograph in his wallet the whole time.

You don’t get handed access like that. You earn it by being the kind of person other people trust with the moment.

What Your Name Is Actually Made Of

Most people think their name, their brand, their reputation, gets built by the biggest thing they’ve ever done. The White House job. The award. The launch. Valdez’s career argues the opposite. His name got built in the room he chose not to enter, in the photographers he made better than himself on purpose, in the Mondays he shows up to a church kitchen sink with nothing to prove and nobody watching.

I think about that every time I sit down with a client at A Place At Home North Austin or get ready to record another episode of Rock Solid. The businesses that last in this community aren’t the ones chasing the biggest headline. They’re the ones who keep showing up for people who can’t pay them back for it. Round Rock Studio’s Brent met Valdez for the first time at this year’s Texas Photography Festival. They’re already talking about doing events together. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when you spend a career being useful instead of being loud.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: if the biggest line on your resume disappeared tomorrow, would your name still mean something to the people around you? Or is everything you’ve built resting on the one moment you got to stand in the photo?

David Valdez has a photo of himself with two presidents in the Oval Office. He’d rather tell you about washing dishes on a Monday. That tells you which one he thinks actually built his name.

Hear the full conversation, including the Berlin Wall story that gave me chills, on this week’s episode of Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders. Learn more about David’s work at davidvaldezphotography.com and follow the festival he built at thetexasphotographyfestival.com.

Watch the Full Episode