Barry Obama, the student who would be President

When a young student calling himself Barry Obama showed up at a small university in Los Angeles in 1980, he had one thing on his mind – meeting girls.

The keen basketball player, body surfer and party animal from his carefree schoolboy days in Hawaii discovered that the girls on this campus weren't into jocks. So he dropped out of Occidental College's basketball team and acquired a new persona. Barry would disappear off the face of the earth to be replaced by Barack.

It was about this time that he was approached by Lisa Jack, an aspiring photographer. She asked him if he would pose for some photographs that she could use in her portfolio. Their first meeting was at a campus canteen and Ms Jack only recalls that "he was really cute. But what else does a 20-year-old girl remember?"

He showed up for the shoot in a Panama hat and leather jacket and posed for a series of photographs. In one, he is sitting on a bed like a young Jimi Hendrix. In others he looks like the writer he once thought of becoming, a cigarette playing on his lips.

For 28 years the photos were lost and it was only when Ms Jack was goaded by a sceptical friend that she decided to hunt down the negatives. She had never believed that the pictures in her basement would ever have a life outside her student-era darkroom. But when Ms Jack found the negatives, the images of the confident-looking young Obama "blew me away".

"You can see he is just posing, initially, but as the shoot goes on, he starts to come out," she told Time magazine, which yesterday named Mr Obama its Person of 2008. "He was very charismatic even then," she added.

Time magazine said it had picked Mr Obama "for having the confidence to sketch an ambitious future in a gloomy hour, and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful he might pull it off". The President-elect beat competition from the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, the creative force behind the Beijing Olympics, Zhang Yimou, and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. "In one of the craziest elections in American history, he overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th President of the United States," Time said.

With the campaign raging, Ms Jack worried that her pictures might be used in attack ads by Mr Obama's rivals. So she rented a safety-deposit box and put the negatives there to be opened after the election. Before that they had been left to moulder in her basement, she having long ago abandoned her ambitions of becoming a photographer and turned instead to psychology.

Ms Jack hopes the photos, unveiled to the world yesterday, reveal a "spirit of fun and thoughtfulness" of the man who is soon to occupy the Oval Office. "I'm not political," she says, "[but] these are historic photos and they should be shared." Obama's time at LA's Occidental College was one of inner turmoil and intellectual development, which he vividly describes in his memoir, Dreams From My Father. "The schools I went to weren't driven by athletics," he recalled. "To get the girls, you had to be the smartest guy in the coffee shop, not the best shooter on the court."

During one particularly intense coffee-house conversation, a black student named Regina upbraided him for reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, saying it was "racist". She then inquired about his given first name, Barack. He candidly recalls telling her that it meant "blessed" in Arabic and that his paternal grandfather was a Muslim. "Do you mind if I call you Barack?" Regina asked.

As the President-elect's biographer David Mendell put it, at this point some readers may see the light bulb pop over the young man in a Panama hat with the likely caption: "Hmmm. Women might just be into the name Barack over Barry." Obama recalls smiling at the young woman: "Not as long as you say it right." That was the end of Barry.