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.

Here we go with another mass of links, but there is too much good stuff out there this week following the Obama victory on Tuesday night. I’ll split this into a couple or three posts I think.

It has been incredible week here in Seattle .. dancing in the streets and wellwishes from the world over (I’ve heard from friends as far as Kosovo, Finland and the UK who are all jumping for joy themselves). Even Thom Yorke, the leader of Radiohead, got in to the spirit and released a free song in celebration. Please feel free to send us your tips and links, or even your own work, and we’ll consider posting it here for the rest to see.

We can start with Magnum | InSight America’s Election Night post with some interesting deadline work by Magnum photographers van Agtmael, Anderson, Vink, Dworzak and Reed. David Alan Harvey chimed in on his blog, bez pictures unfortunately, with “Obamatime…”

We can’t miss Alan Chin’s contribution over at BAGNewsnotes (which I was happy to see got a shout-out on APhotoEditor’s blog in Rob’s own campaign wrapup). Be sure to read the comments. And start following BAGNews right now if you aren’t familiar with it; there will be lots of great insights in the coming days (it has already started) about the election-night pictures.

Here is a cool little slideshow (sideshow?) at Time by photographers Christopher Morris and Danny Wilcox Frazier at John McCain’s Campaign Farewell in Phoenix, Arizona.

From some international photographers: Swedish/Polish photographer Chris Maluszynski, a favorite from the Moment Agency, offers his take from the election in Chicago. And Bruno Stevens from Brussels will soon be posting more from his Land of the Free: America 2008 work. Cross your fingers it will get up, and stay up, on those Digital Railroad servers.

Watching the day-after coverage on the major American networks last night I saw reports and interviews with two Obama-centric photographers. Time photographer Callie Shell, who is popping up everywhere these days (see this popular feature at Digital Journalist) was on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show (can’t for the life of me find it online) and NBC nightly news (click in to their player and search for ‘Obama’s incredible journey in pictures’). Also notable is that Tufankjian is releasing a book titled Yes We Can of her nearly two-year Obama project through PowerHouse Books.

The SLOG pointed me in the direction of Philly photographer Zoe Strauss (I guess M. Scott’s mention of her to me didn’t stick) and her new book “America”. I haven’t seen too much yet but it looks good. Philadelphia Weekly also published a cover story and selection of the work this week, and that seems like a great place to start reading about Strauss and the pictures.

Perennial favorite Chip Litherland posts some pictures from his extra-long election day assignments on his Sportsshooter page.

On the Newspaper front: Andrew Sullivan has the final tally of newspaper endorsements. A little out of date, but the New York Times has Campaign Trail photo galleries from a bunch of its photographers. And the cherries on top: PDN writes about the great day for print journalism with record sell-outs of newspapers and the Newseum’s roundup of the world’s newspapers announcing Obama’s election (including this radical horizontal cover by the Hartford Courant, spotted by M. Scott). Truly a worldwide moment.

More soon….

Time magazine has published a number of photo essays on its website covering the final days of both Barack Obama and John McCain’s presidential campaigns.  Christopher Morris brings his signature style to John McCain’s Final Push and John McCain’s Long Distance Campaign. Callie Shell, likewise, has Barack Obama Hits the Homestretch and The Campaign from Obama’s View.  

 

Both photographers have been covering these candidates since very early in the campaign.  Shell’s work following the Obama campaign was recently published and discussed on Digital Journalist.  The essay has made the jump to non-photo-related websites and has been mentioned all over the internet as a great glimpse into the life of a candidate in a media climate where such access is almost impossible to get.  A particularly long thread over at Metafilter discusses the work.  I love non-photographers’ discussion of photography because it’s one of the few ways a photographer can learn how their work is intrepreted by the thousands or millions of eyes that see it.  A side note: one commentor’s statement that “It must be a law of the internet that all photography sites must have different but equally unusable interfaces,” strikes me as particularly true.  

Christopher Morris’ has been photographing McCain since 2000, but with Digital Railroad’s recent problems, the VII archive is broken.  A recent collection of the work can be seen here on the main VII site.

While we’re on the subject, Susan Raab made a thoughtful post about the effect caused in the viewer by the subject of the photos.  Particularly, she notes plenty of praise for photos of Obama and relatively little or no praise for photos of McCain.  Surely Morris’ or Stephen Crowley’s coverage of McCain for the NYTimes is of a comparable level of Shell’s (or at least others’) work on Obama…

UPDATE by Scott: I just found a link to some more Stephen Crowley work at Digital Journalist called Covering the “No Talk Express,” in which he laments the difficulty journalists have had getting access to McCain and Palin in recent weeks. Lauren Greenfield also recently covered the McCain-Palin campaign for the NYT Magazine and has a photo or two showing this lack of access. Don’t miss the picture of the journalist sleeping next to cardboard cut-outs of the two candidates.