Obama’s Burden from Christopher Morris on Vimeo.

You probably already know Christopher Morris‘ work. One of the founding members of VII, his conflict photography is unparalleled and his recent work on American politics, including the book “My America,” has redefined visual coverage of the White House. You might not know that Morris has been making videos in addition to his still coverage of American politics. Emotionally resonant and forceful, these videos look like none others produced in the 5DMarkII-fueled push toward moving images in photojournalism. The videos resemble Morris’ still work, but their use of music, black and white imagery, and tone make them something altogether different.  He’s released four videos, all worth watching:

The Dear Leader

The New Leader

Obama’s Burden (embedded at the top of this post)

Obama’s War

Christopher Morris recently started a thread on lightstalkers to discuss his videos, and the response was varied. Make sure to read through that thread. The discussion there is interesting and touched on many aspects of Morris’ video work not covered in this interview (if you don’t have a lightstalkers account, email me), and I thought Morris’ videos would be a great subject for one of our periodic interviews here at dvafoto. I was delighted when Morris agreed to the interview. The discussion, conducted over email, is below. Our questions are in bold, followed by Morris’ full responses. If you’re reading on the front page, be sure to click through to the post to see the full interview.

dvafoto: What are you showing us with the videos? When “Dear Leader” first came out, the title (equating Bush with Kim Jong Il) and the tone and the video itself suggested to me a critical portrayal of the previous administration. Now seeing a similar tone in the Obama videos, it strikes me that you aren’t focusing directly on the man in the office, but the office itself and its theater and cultural baggage.

Christopher Morris: I’m showing you what I feel. Each one of these has a very distinct clear meaning for me. As for the viewer? That’s something I’m not quite sure of. This is the beauty of this whole process. They are whatever you want them to be.

I seem to remember you speaking or writing about what would become “My America” as appealing both to the Bush administration’s supporters and detractors. From the same photos, one side saw images of patriotism and strong leadership, while the other saw demagogy, jingoism, and blind, wrong-headed faith in a politician. Have you gotten the same reaction from your videos? From your coverage of Obama? How do you feel about this emotional ambiguity? is it your goal?

Each one of these short films has a distinct meaning for me. I know exactly what I’m trying to convey, what mood and emotion I’m trying to bring out of the viewer in each one of these… The exciting thing about the whole process though… is the emotion that I may want to convey… will actually with some, be the complete opposite or even something that I’ve never even thought of.

Your lightstalkers thread called your videos “experiments,” why are they experiments? Will they become more than an experiment for you? What got you started shooting video? How do you fit in the video shooting with the stills and deadlines? What influenced the style of your videos?

Here I’ll give a short synopsis of each of the Obama works and how they really came about. The first one I did was “The New Leader“. I didn’t wake up and think oh I’m going to make a statement about the Presidency today. It really started as I was sitting in the balcony of Capitol Hill while the President was about to step out to address the Nation on his Health Care Reform. I had been loaned one of the new Canon 7d’ cameras to test the day before. So literally 5 minutes before he came out, I decided to attempt to shoot some video of him at the start. Still images from a balcony 100 feet away of someone walking down the center aisle really do not make for great photography. So why now shoot video instead.. Later the next day when I put the clips into my laptop. I was stunned, with the whole quality and the mood of the images. In the next few day’s the President left for Wall Street to make an address on the Economy in New York. Basically here is a man that is trying to sell the nation on Health Care, the Economy, the War. The urgency of everything. This is what I’ve attempted to convey in “The New Leader” short.

All of this was really just an experiment to test out the 7D. There were and still are many parts that should be edited out. This is why on returning to DC in November, my initial plan was to attempt to record some more clips of the President to re-edit into the film. Then on Veterans Day, Obama was to visit Arlington National Cemetery and deliver a speech. This time using the Canon 5D, I basically shot non-stop from the moment the motorcade left the White House until it returned. Right away during the drive I could sense how visually stunning the motorcade footage was, with the added historical importance of the President’s visit, and that this couldn’t be edited into my earlier video. It would stand on its own ["Obama's Burden"]. What struck me is that roughly 10 cars in front of me is the President in his limousine looking out at the constant and never ending tombstones of our war dead.

And then in December, Obama was to fly to West Point to address the nation on his decision regarding Afghanistan. Hence, “Obama’s War.” The choice of the music here is really interesting. What I do, is while playing one of the clips, I will cycle through some songs to see if anything fits the mood I’m attempting to convey. Having already downloaded some music files from pumpaudio.com, I had something in mind. By mistake I inadvertently played this Russian folklore song called Jolly Talk, by DrevA. For me it was perfect, here was this Russian voice taunting us with her simple words. Taunting us, for now it was our turn to send our young cadets to Afghanistan. The same thing Russian cadets were doing 30 years before. As for the images of the C5A cargo plane, they were shot the same night at an Air Force base near West Point. They are from the window of the helicopter as we taxied for take-off. For me they represented the planes that would carry the young cadets to war. They had almost this coffin like quality to them.
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In spite of some killer photography of late (Q. Sakamaki, Adam Ferguson, Eros Hoagland), the magazine’s $30 cover photo and this collection of fake “What if” opinion photos of President Obama winning music and sports awards have made me shake my head in disbelief.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good ridiculous photo. I’ll admit to having spent time at FailBlog and There, I Fixed It and This is Photobomb and ICanHazCheezburger. But, for a magazine such as Time, which I still believe has journalistic importance and merit, this photo essay of illustrations denigrating Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize in such a ham-handed and childish and poorly-executed way…I’m at a loss for words.

What’s the point?

From Bagnews comes word and visual evidence of the much talked about Newsweek redesign. The website has also been redesigned, and multimedia and photos seem to play a larger role (now with a separate section like at Time’s website!) The Guardian has some of the nitty-gritty, including this little nugget:

…the ex-staffer adds that senior managers have created a newsroom culture where “there is a total disdain and contempt for the kind of on-the-ground reporting that people like us, who grew up in the Newsweek tradition, [carry out]“. He claims that journalists based overseas were told that newsgathering could be conducted over the phone. The emphasis has shifted to comment and analysis, with more columnists and longer articles.”

Sounds like an opinion fueled by bad blood and the staffer in question hasn’t been in the newsroom for a few years…. The new design looks great to me, from what little I’ve seen. The website is much more readable than it was before, and the magazine is said to have an increased emphasis on photography.

“I’m envious of [chief White House photographer Pete] Souza,” says former White House photographer David Hume Kennerly. “You couldn’t cast a situation better: an attractive couple, the first black president, two kids, the dog.”

Slate’s John Dickerson has an annotated slideshow of pictures from Obama’s Presidency which are hanging in the White House. While the pictures aren’t new (ED: see note at bottom), and are all publicly available via the White House website, there are some interesting quotes from official presidential photographer Pete Souza and David Hume Kennerly, who used to have the same job.

This is the first time that I’ve heard about the practice of putting up pictures of the President all around the working quarters of the White House. In fact the first picture in the slideshow shows Obama entering the WH “on his first day of work” and seeing pictures of his Inauguration from the day before, after the photo staff worked overnight “so that Obama wouldn’t face empty walls and lonely hooks in his new office.” Interesting, also said: “But the photographs aren’t just for the president. They’re for the staffers who don’t get to see him much. Those who are captured in a photograph with Obama—from White House stewards to speechwriters to journalists—get the thrill of being on public display.” A bit strange and even vane, and definitely in line with the ‘cult of personality’ critiques and warnings, but I’m also laughing a bit at the idea that they are surrounding the staff with pictures of their boss who they never get to see, in an effort for the team to feel closer to him? Note too that this has been a “long-standing presidential tradition” since Nixon.

UPDATE: I just got an email from the estimable John Dickerson himself correcting me when I said that these pictures had already been released and were publicly available. In fact they’re an exclusive to Slate. Cool for them, glad they’re dealing with photography a bit outside of their daily Magnum pictures feature.

Inauguration day will go down as one of the biggest, strangest and interesting days of my career. Woke up early, walked, waited, shot, waited, froze, shot then walk again. Edit for another few hours and then sleep.
Got to see Obama walk down the parade route, only an hour behind schedule and after many hours of waiting around. The lines to get in to the secure area were terrible, you’ll see pictures of people who had waited for many many more hours than I. It was a day of patience and just a little bit of reward. As I said in the post before this, I am very excited I was able to be in DC to make these pictures. The hardships all of us on the streets faced will soon be forgotten and the positive memories will remain. Selective memory of course, but we were there.

I think the enduring memory of this week for me will be these vendors who were selling all manor of Obama-themed crap on the streets of DC. The vendors’ personalities and the real (American consumerist derived) enthusiasm for their wares shown by almost all of the people on the streets really spoke to an underlying nature of the spectacle and self-awareness by participants in the ‘historic nature’ of their being there. This, I guess, provided the market for $1 “I was there!” bookmarks. I guess that I finish thinking that even though we were aware what we were making history and acted like it, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still an honest, earnest thing.
Telling too was the day after. Here are a few pictures from Wednesday afternoon in DC … the cleanup, the happy crowds (much much happier than everywhere else before … a commenter on BagNewsNotes had it right. I think it was just too cold to smile, even though people knew the gravity of the moment around them and were truly excited about being there. Why else, really, would they have traveled a distance, gotten up so early only to wait in the deep cold for so long.) Wednesday, though, was all about the ‘new day’ weather. It was warmer, sunny. It created a different mood. Lighter, wonderful, relaxed. A sigh of relief and contentment after pomp and ceremony. Even the Police were smiling. Again, maybe this was just my reaction bleeding into the pictures (it happens for all photographers, journalists, storytellers) but that is the very point.



Thanks for looking everyone. Be sure to check out our partner BagNewsNotes for great analysis of these pictures and many more. Particularly, you must see my colleague Alan Chin’s work from DC called, appropriately, the First Draft of History. It gets to the heart of what his aims were in covering this. Well done Alan and Michael, thanks very much for the opportunity to work alongside you.

I am back in New York City after five long and memorable days in Washington DC (and the road down) for the Obama inauguration. Both then and ever more now in retrospect, I am so happy I had the chance to be there to see this in person, and to be able to make pictures that will remain in my archive forever. There was much that was set-up, scripted and predictable about this event but there were many more genuine people and moments. I was struck by so many little things over the week that really, if I can try to be unsentimental about it, made me realize the true profound nature of this moment in American history. As I said the other day, this is really a big part of why I take pictures … to document, live and interpret the big events of my day for posterity.

I wasn’t the only one with this aim, of course, and I have been enjoying seeing other peoples’ work from DC. Hopefully my work can contribute to the collective memory of this day. To that end, here is a large selection of pictures from Inauguration Eve. Mostly they’re quiet moments, away from ‘the pictures’ of the day. I think this edit, and the ones coming immediately after this here on Dva featuring my work from Inauguration Day, embodies my feelings and perspective on the event, and hopefully it says it without words.

Matt had hinted in our first post-election linkdump that we’d have more to share. He covered most of what I wanted to show, though. One shot that really stood out for me was the above picture from August by Callie Shell, to whom we’ve linked before. I’m pointing out the obvious here, but the parallels to Paul Fusco’s amazing RFK Funeral Train essay are astounding. I’ve included a picture below, but the whole series or the narrated slideshow published by the NYT earlier this year are worth a look. Both offer a compelling glance at history and politics from the other side, looking outward from within. There’s a glimpse of hope, solemness, solidarity, patriotism, and gravity in the pictures that a lot of political photography often lacks. I found Shell’s picture in BagNewsNotes’ liveblogging of the visual side of election night.

Matt also previously linked to Newseum’s collection of Nov. 5th’s newspaper covers. Loved the San Francisco Chronicle’s cover. And while all of the Obama covers sold out, most everyone probably got their news on television or online. News websites have a massive tendency toward linkrot, revisions, and other transient symptoms; their coverage disappears into the ether, and the Internet Archive’s a pretty poor substitute for microfiche. Electioneering ‘08 stepped in to fill the void with periodic screenshots of major news websites throughout the night of the election. Click on a date and time and you’ll see the front page of the New York Times, Drudge Report, CNN, the McCain and Obama campaign websites, and other significant sites. Here’s Nov. 4th at 10:45pm compared with 11:15pm, when most organizations had called the election. Fascinating to see the progression. (Got that link from Kottke.org, who’s also got a great roundup of election maps from various news sites. Keep an eye out for the hand-drawn map on a whiteboard, which reminded me of a photo of a hand-drawn stock ticker in Iraq. Kottke also recently linked to an interesting visual analysis by Serial Consign of the LA Times front pages and website from 1895 to 2006. I’m getting distracted….)

Can’t remember where I first saw this linked…Jon Lowenstein put up an interesting set of polaroids from election day on the Noor Images site. Great work offering a perspective of election day in Chicago far removed from the glitz of the celebration that night in Grant Park.

PDNpulse posted a list of what they say are the 5 photos that clinched the election for Obama. The above Economist cover didn’t make the cut, and didn’t deserve to, but I like it anyway. Not as much as the Rolling Stone cover mentioned in PDNpulse’s article, though…

I also want to point out pictures being posted to Flickr such as this one or these, in which voters documented their polling stations, waiting in line to vote, and other happenings during the voting process. The pictures aren’t good by any aesthetic measure, but I think it’s interesting to see these social media sites used as a way of recording one’s own history and using that as a way, in this case, to make sure that the election is being conducted properly. Flickr is the world’s largest shoebox, and there’s a future jackpot of anthropological treasure waiting in these sorts of shots, if they survive the years better than Digital Railroad.

I was also particularly fascinated by the strong use of black and white still photography in Barack Obama’s infomercial, which aired on a number of US networks and youtube prior to the election. The video throughout the piece is well done, but nothing makes an impact like a beautifully shot photo. At least that’s why I think the production team chose a still photo for the closing note of one of Obama’s final appeals to the American people.

President-Elect Barack Obama has rolled out a brand-new site detailing his transition plans: Change.gov. Good idea maybe (a lot of my friends are linking and smiling about it on facebook), but it feels so weird. Maybe it is rolled out too soon? Foreign Policy’s Passport Blog found it first and found an even uglier site (check the link). It gets worse though, look at this lead picture.

First, what a strange picture … Obama looks so tired and solemn (which I assume are very likely and real emotions for a man going through that moment) and it doesn’t seem like the ‘message’ you want to send into the blistering transition period. Second, oh, what a weird burn job on that stadium light behind them. I think I’m going to submit this both to BAGNewsnotes and Photoshop Disasters.

Speaking of change though, go read Rob Haggart’s rousing call for it in the publishing industry on his A Photo Editor blog. One of his ideas: “Gather all the employees you were about to fire because they don’t fit in so well with your organization or because they are too green to have mastered traditional publishing and give them promotions. Put them in charge. Gather all the people you’ve trained to say no to change and yes to whatever you say is good and fire them (ok I know this will mean there is nobody left in accounting and IT so keep a few of them around but maybe go for the junior ones).”

One more: Newspaper Execs Jokes over at Recovering Journalist Blog. Funny, and it deals kinda with the change that needs (and probably won’t) come to newspapers…

Oh, and give M. Scott all the credit for talking first about the ugly burn job. I just posted before him.

UPDATE (a few minutes later): I really should have taken more of a look around the site, as Scott did, because he found this at http://www.change.gov/americaserves/plan:

I didn’t take any pictures for ‘work’ on Tuesday night, I took them for myself and friends to remember this moment. Maybe I’ll regret not doing more on this historic election night both as a citizen and as a journalist — on both accounts I kind of wish I were at the big street parties (possibly NSFW, it is a free-for-all Flickr group) in a different neighborhood of Seattle — but I had a great time watching the early returns on the computer and then watching the announcement and two speeches at a friends house with a bunch of other young people. A very memorable night.

What are your memories? Where are your pictures? Doesn’t matter where in the world you were, I’d love to see them. One of the most indelible impressions of this election is how (positively) interested the World is in this election. Hell, I was grilled about my choice in the Democratic Primary back in June by an Albanian taxi driver in Pristina, Kosovo that I could hardly communicate with: this thing is big and I want to see how you all experienced it. Post in the comments or send them to me via email and I’ll put them up.

We’ll get a roundup of election photography later, but I couldn’t resist posting the above illustration by Patrick Moberg. Even Millard Fillmore looks likable! (first noticed, uncredited, on Metafilter, but Conscientious found the name)