How Photography Has Transformed the U.S. Presidential Election

 

Via Blind
October 19, 2020
By Miss Rosen

A new exhibition looks at how photography has been used to shape public image and garner public support for candidates campaigning for the most powerful office in the world.

Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Presidential Campaign, New Hampshire © Brooks Kraft / Monroe Gallery of Photography

“Politics is theater. It doesn't matter if you win. You make a statement. You say, ‘I'm here, pay attention to me,’” said Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California. Invariably photography, with its paradoxical ability to convey fact and fiction at the same time, has long played a major role in shaping political messages without ever saying a word.

The new exhibition, The Campaign, looks at how photographers have documented the race for the most powerful office in the world — that of the U.S. Presidency — over the past 80 years from the campaign trail to inauguration day. The exhibition, which features work by Cornell Capa, Bill Ray, John Leongard, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Neil Leifer, Brooks Kraft, and Nina Berman, among others, dates back to Thomas E. Dewey’s run in 1948, which resulted in one of the greatest upsets in election history.

1948 Republican Convention, Philadelphia, PA © Irving Haberman / Monroe Gallery of Photography

Irving Haberman’s vibrant crowd scene shows just how influential the photograph was, as countless members of the crowd bear placards with Dewey’s confident visage gazing intently at us, emoting the perfect blend of assurance and artifice Americans have grown to know and love.

The Tragic Hero

Bobby Kennedy campaigns in Indiana during May of 1968, with various aides and friends: former prizefighter Tony Zale and (right of Kennedy) N.F.L. stars Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Deacon Jones © Bill Eppridge / Monroe Gallery of Photography

“Reporters listen, photographers look,” photographer Bill Eppridge said during the Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 tragic run, which ultimately resulted in his shocking death on the campaign trail before he could clinch the Democratic nomination. Kennedy, whose public profile was closely welded to his brother’s legacy, understood the language of visibility and representation long before they became buzzwords. 

In Eppridge’s photograph of Kennedy campaigning in the Watts section of Los Angeles on the last day of the primary — just three years after riots against police brutality devastated the neighborhood — we see the former Attorney General symbolically standing on the shoulders of Black men, his wide smile standing in stark contrast to the cautious looks on their face. Eppridge’s image underscores the complex mixture of naïveté and hubris that privilege provides when confronting the rapacious specter of American violence.

The Kennedy campaign travels through the Watts section of Los Angeles on the last day before the primary, 1968 © Bill Eppridge / Monroe Gallery of Photography

The Power of Photography

This September, more than 73 million people tuned in to the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — just the kind of ratings the President loves. As a failed businessman who rebranded his image through reality TV, Trump understands better than most the power image holds over the American public.

President Barack Obama campaigns in the rain, Glen Allen, Virginia, 2012 © Brooks Kraft / Monroe Gallery of PhotographyBeing camera ready became a necessity in 1960 when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon held the first televised debate. Standing in the control room, Irving Haberman photographed the television studio as the scene unfolded, giving viewers a behind-the-scene look at this historic event. 

We focus our attention not on the action but on the TV monitor that beamed Kennedy’s radiant face into millions of American homes. The camera showed Kennedy as the picture of vitality an image that belied his actual health. Calm, cool, and collected, Kennedy soared while Nixon faltered — allowing the public to happily forgo the enduring wisdom of Edgar Allen Poe: “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

John F. Kennedy, on-set monitor at the first-ever televised Presidential debate in 1960 © Irving Haberman / Monroe Gallery of Photography

Richard Nixon giving a speech to the residents of Suffolk County, NY while on the campaign trail in 1968 © Irving Haberman / Monroe Gallery of Photography

 

By Miss Rosen

Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer focusing on art, photography, and culture. Her work has been published in books, magazines, and websites including Time, Vogue, Artsy, Aperture, Dazed, and Vice, among others.

The Campaign 

Through November 15, 2020

Monroe Gallery, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM 87501

https://www.monroegallery.com/

On the campaign trail

 

Via The Albuquerque Journal
October 18, 2020

By Kathaleen Roberts

Presidential candidate Jack Kennedy conferring with his brother and campaign organizer Bobby Kennedy in a hotel suite as they are silhouetted by the sunlight coming through the drawn window drapes. Photo by Hank Walker/The Life Picture Collection. (Courtesy of The Monroe Gallery Of Photography)

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As the pandemic forces our politics into virtual reality, a Santa Fe gallery is taking a look back at the grueling, crowded and ultimately dangerous presidential campaigns of decades past.

Open at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography, monroegallery.com, “The Campaign” explores the human dimension of the process by which Americans choose their presidents. These photographers sought (and often got) an intimate access far beyond the campaigns’ carefully curated images. The images will remain online through Nov. 15.

“Reporters listen, photographers look,” the late photojournalist Bill Eppridge said about the 1968 Robert F. Kennedy campaign.

“You’re searching for a perspective everybody isn’t getting,” gallery co-owner Sidney Monroe said. “You’re trying to get something beyond their image machine. It’s grueling.

“Campaigns were not as big; they were not as fast,” gallery co-owner Michelle Monroe added. “You could do a cross-country train trip. Everything now is not staged, but they try to control it. The very relationship with the press has changed everything – when you think of the press being complicit in hiding (Franklin) Roosevelt’s disability.”

Richard Nixon giving a speech to the residents of Suffolk County, New York, while on the 1968 campaign trail. By Irving Haberman.

Not a comprehensive exhibit, the show features only the artists in the gallery’s stable and their most significant campaigns.

The exhibition examines a time when photographing presidential campaigns often required patience and endurance: long days were the norm, and getting beyond the carefully constructed stagecraft and tightly scripted events proved difficult. Campaign staff and security frequently monitored (and controlled) the movement of media; capturing iconic visual symbols of democracy in action was the forte of the successful campaign photograph.

Hank Walker’s 1960 silhouette of John and Robert Kennedy conferring in a Los Angeles hotel bedroom shows the two brothers in deep conversation. Walker covered the campaign for Life magazine.

“Bobby was acting as campaign manager for Jack,” Sidney Monroe said. “That’s the moment Jack told Bobby he had chosen (Lyndon) Johnson as the vice presidential candidate. Bobby and Johnson were sworn enemies.

“Later, in the hallway, Walker saw Bobby storm out, swearing, ‘S—, s—, s—.’ ”

“Jack thought it was the only way he could win Texas,” Michelle added. “Bobby referred to Johnson as ‘an animal.’ ”

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and members of  the “Fearsome Foursome” of the Los Angeles Rams football team in Indianapolis, 1968. By Bill Eppridge.

Joe McNally’s 1988 portrait of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden riding a train captures the candidate in a contemplative mood.

“It was also after Biden had suffered an aneurysm and this was his return,” Sidney said. “(McNally) said he came across as a stoic, very relatable candidate.”

Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign. Photo by Brooks Kraft.

Irving Haberman’s campaign silhouette from 1968 shows the unmistakable shadow of Richard Nixon.

“It’s a prime example of a great campaign photograph,” Sidney said. “It’s dramatic, it carries a lot of weight; it’s kind of heroic.”

Most photographers captured Hillary Clinton emoting, with her mouth open, during the 2008 presidential race. Brooks Kraft took the opposite approach, shooting her listening to a constituent as she held a cup of coffee.

“He was the White House photographer for Time magazine for 10 years,” Sidney said.

John F. Kennedy, on-set monitor at the first-ever televised presidential debate, 1960. By Irving Haberman.

Kraft’s portrait of Barack Obama speaking in the rain reveals the determination and grit necessary to run for president.

“That’s actually Brooks’ favorite photograph,” Sidney said. “It really is a transcendent image.”

President Barack Obama speaks in the rain during a campaign rally in Glen Allen, Virginia, 2012. By Brooks Kraft.

In 1960 Haberman captured the Nixon-Kennedy first-ever TV debate from both the stage and its monitors.

“He was working for CBS as a photographer, so he had intimate access,” Sidney said. “It was the first time when candidates had to look good on TV. Everybody says the way Nixon looked is what sank him. There’s a lot packed into that picture.”

Joe Biden commuting on a train in 1988. By Joe McNally.

A trio of Eppridge’s Life magazine photographs capture both the excitement and the danger of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid. The images include the famous “Fearsome Foursome” Los Angeles Rams football players who served as his bodyguards. His passionate supporters ranged from people of color to women and immigrants. Eppridge said it was hard not to be inspired and retain his journalistic neutrality.

“It was after (Kennedy’s) brother’s assassination, which was an open wound,” Michelle said, “and the sense of hopelessness that the Vietnam War would go on forever.”

Eppridge said as the crowds swelled into pandemonium on a daily basis, even the press were in fear for the candidate’s life.

Eppridge would go on to take the famous photograph of a dying RFK at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel.

If you go

WHAT: “The Campaign”

WHEN: 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday-Saturday

WHERE: Monroe Gallery  (Face masks required; limited to 10 visitors at a time)

HOW MUCH: Free to attend. Information at 505-982-0200, monroegallery.com

PBS program "Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America" features Bill Eppridge's photograph of the Chaney Family

 

Via PBS

The key art for the new PBS film "Driving While Black" features Bill Eppridge's photograph of the Cheney family driving to James Chaney's funeral in Meridan, Mississippi, August, 1964

Discover how the advent of the automobile brought new mobility and freedom for African Americans but also exposed them to discrimination and deadly violence, and how that history resonates today.

A ground-breaking, two-hour documentary film by acclaimed historian Dr. Gretchen Sorin and Emmy–winning director Ric Burns– will air on PBS on Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 9:00 p.m. ET

   

View the full film here

 View the full press release here. 

View Bill Eppridge's photography here.

 

Via TED Countdown Global Launch

October 10, 2020

24 hours on Earth — in one image

Stephen Wilkes • Countdown • October 2020

"Nature reveals itself to us in unique ways, if we stop and look at the world through a window of time," says photographer Stephen Wilkes. Using a special photographic technique that reveals how a scene changes from day to night in a single image, Wilkes exposes the Earth's beautiful complexity and the impacts of climate change — from the disruption of flamingo migrations in Africa to the threat of melting ice — with unprecedented force.

"Watching the Earth Melt Away", directed by Joe McNally, at the Ridgefield Independent Film Festival

Via Ridgefield's Hamlet Hub

October 9, 2020

"Watching the Earth Melt Away" directed by Joe McNally, an internationally-acclaimed, award-winning photographer and filmmaker will screen live on Friday, October 16 @ 4:00 pm at the Ridgefield Theater Barn and is also available to screen virtually.

Watching The Earth Melt Away is a wake-up call to climate change. In 2001, McNally covered a story about George Divoky, an ornithologist who, at that time had spent three months every summer for the past 28 years, living on a Cooper Island, a forbidding stretch of ice north of Alaska, where he studied artic seabirds. Over the course of his study though, which has now spanned 46 years, Divoky had inadvertently amassed one of the world’s largest experiential accounts of global warning. In 2001, McNally took a breathtaking photo of Divoky standing on a stretch of ice with the artic sky behind him. When McNally returned to Cooper Island in 2019, he recreated the photograph. The glaring difference between the two said it all—Divoky was standing knee deep in water. The magnitude and speed with which the landscape had melted and changed is heartbreakingly evident in the haunting film, Watching The Earth Melt Away.

Bones to pick: Obscure items in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

 

Via Pasatiempo

The Santa Fe New Mexican

September 25, 2020

Georgia O'Keeffe: Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, 1945

©Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

...“I think, in particular, of the way she uses the pelvis bone,” (Museum Fellow Victoria) Plotek says. “It becomes a device she uses to frame her compositions. One of the centerpieces of her New Mexico paintings is a pelvis painting where the pelvis is sort of framing this oval of blue sky. It would be impossible for anyone to know what the motif was without looking at the label. But it becomes a recurring motif for her.”

Take, for example, Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow (1945). It looks like an abstraction: a yellow ovoid form surrounded by a nebulous, organic shape rendered in shades of pale white and ochre. Once it registers that the pale-and-ochre shape is a pelvic bone, you no longer view the painting as an abstraction but as a painting of a representational form.

“That painting, where O’Keeffe abstracts the bone, is the subject of a very famous photograph by Tony Vaccaro,”  ...

©Tony Vaccaro: Georgia O'Keeffe with painting, New Mexico, 1960

Full article here.

BOB GOMEL: EYEWITNESS NOW AVAILABLE

 

When history was made, Bob Gomel was there. This documentary examines the stories behind the stories of some of the most significant events in the 20th century. Hear and see the history unfold from the perspective of a legendary LIFE Magazine photographer.

Now available from Amazon Prime

View a selection of available Bob Gomel prints.

Photograph Daily Podcast: Meet Ryan Vizzions

 

Via Photograph Daily


September 16, 2020

Meet Ryan Vizzions, a photographer who started making pictures at the most difficult time of his life after losing his father to suicide. He quit his job at a Fortune 500 company, travelled half way across the world to Bangkok, a place chosen randomly from the spin of a world globe, to find himself alone in the midst of civil unrest in Thailand during the 'Red shirt protests' of 2010. It was to be a trip that shaped his photographic future covering stories of injustice and protest.

Ryan has since photographed protest and the plight of protestors whilst building what you could describe as a more ‘regular’ successful commercial photography business, but it’s clear where his passion lies, in making photo documentaries about social injustice. It’s a journey as you’ll hear in the continuation (part 2) of this story that has landed him with a government agency file. Today he is one of the growing voices in the photography community that believe it has become harder to tell photo stories with the freedoms once enjoyed.

Ryan Vizzions: "Defend The Sacred", Standing Rock, Cannon Ball, 

North Dakota, 2016

Photographs copyright Ryan Vizzions. Not to be reproduced or used without express permission of the photographer. 

Today's show is kindly supported by www.imagesalon.com - outsource your post production and spend more time shooting and working on your business with 25% off your first order in 2020.

Comment on the show: studio@photographydaily.show




Photographs copyright Ryan Vizzions. Not to be reproduced or used without express permission of the photographer.

FURTHER REFERENCE:

Thailands reds and yellows, a story published on the BBC website and a further article on the protests of 2010

NPR’s report on COINTELPRO

Jürgen Schadeberg, Whose Photos Chronicled Apartheid, Dies at 89

 

                 ©Jurgen Schadeberg: Nelson Mandela's return to his Cell on Robben Island 1994

The New York Times

Jürgen Schadeberg, a German-born photographer who survived the turmoil of wartime Berlin, then emigrated to South Africa, creating some of the most potent and enduring images of Nelson Mandela and chronicling the increasingly violent imposition of apartheid on Black lives, died on Saturday at his home in La Drova, Spain. He was 89.

Independent Online

Jürgen Schadeberg, the photographer who took the iconic picture of former president Nelson Mandela looking through the bars of his cell on Robben Island, has died. He was 89 years old.

The Citizen

With a large body of work and critical acclaim internationally, Schadeberg will be most remembered by younger generations for his famous photograph of Nelson Mandela looking through the bars of his Robben Island prison cell.

Arts 24

The things we will remember about Jürgen Schadeberg

MONROE GALLERY LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE

Santa Fe, NM -- Monroe Gallery of Photography proudly announces the launch of its new website www.monroegallery.com with a short video “Photography: The medium of our time”. 

 The new site has been completely revised for easier viewing of exhibitions and photographer’s collections. A new short video highlights Monroe Gallery of Photography’s specialized focus of 20th and 21st Century photojournalism—images that are embedded in our collective consciousness and which form a shared visual heritage for human society. Many of these photographs not only moved the public at the time of their publication but maintain the power to stir the consciousness (and conscience) today. These images set social and political changes in motion, transforming the way we live and think—in a shared medium that is a singular intersectionality of art and journalism. 

 Monroe Gallery of Photography was founded by Sidney S. Monroe and Michelle A. Monroe in 2001, following decades of experience in New York City. The Gallery is currently open to the public and is New Mexico Safe Certified in Covid-19 operating procedures. Current modified Gallery hours are 10 to 3 daily, admission is free. In accordance with mandated health guidelines face masks are required and visitors must maintain social distancing of at least 6 feet. The gallery is limiting the number of visitors to approximately 10 people at a time. Private viewing is available by appointment. 

The new website was created by WebSight Design, a Bay Area web development company that provides clients with creativity, dependability, and value since 1995.