Capturing History

In the slideshow above, you can see a photo set the Obama campaign’s long-time photographer David Katz posted to Yahoo’s photo sharing site that I use all the time for my images, Flickr. I think it’s fascinating (and progressive) that the Obama campaign elected to have these posted to a social media site like Flickr, but unfortunately – the photos are simply not as good as they could or should be. They are not sharp, they are poorly framed, many have motion blurring and really come across as looking like snapshots. In short, the image fall far short of what I’d expect to see from a professional who might have had this sort of access to – dare I say it – history. In the past, someone like David Burnett or Jacques Lowe would have captured these sort of intimate moments – fulfilling the dual needs of being not only attuned to the intimacy of the access they’d been given but also fully capable of capturing truly compelling and high quality images of moments which will never happen again. But here, the images don’t stand alone very well. And that’s really too bad.