In in a thread over at Lightstalkers thanking people for their comments on his (remarkable) video The Dear Leader, Christopher Morris mentioned that he has a new video out (and, probably, more to come as he just finished a two-week video roadtrip around the US). It is a bit more rough than the Dear Leader film, focused on the last days of the John McCain Presidential campaign. And, for those interested, he said it was shot on the new Canon 5d MkII (see the thread for more info)

Here is a direct link to the video. It is also on the TIME magazine site, though no one can seem to get it to play there.

Morris definitely has me more interested in trying video, as a different way of expressing something.. anyone want to lend me a MkII?

Christopher Morris - The GOP candidate speaks to the crowd in New Columbus.

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.  

Callie Shell - Obama awaits his cue at James Madison University.

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.

HuffingtonPost.com mentions a conversation Sarah Palin had on a talk radio show on Friday in which the Republican vice presidential candidate suggests that media criticism of her campaign threatens her right to free speech protected in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution (audio here).  Over at Salon.com, analysis rightly points out that the first amendment protects the media’s right to print whatever it wants within the bounds of slander, libel, and obscenity laws.  

From the other side, right wing blogs are critical of the Obama campaign’s treatment of various McCain-endorsing media companies during the final leg of the election.   The Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Post, have all been denied a seat on Obama’s planes in recent days.  The campaign says it’s due to past constraints.  This follows previous concern over a reporter from the New Yorker being denied a spot on the plane after the infamous over-the-top New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as an anti-American muslim and terrorist.

Graph of US newspapers 2008 and 2004 presidential election endorsements - By Philip (Flip) Kromer, flip@infochimps.org, using data from Editor & Publisher. Visualization released under CC-BY license

Infochimps.org has just published a great interactive map of newspapers official presidential endorsements for the 2008 US election (here’s infochimps’ associated blog post about the map). When you hover over the dots, the map presents both the 2004 and 2008 endorsements along with the name of the publication and its circulation (the larger dots on the map also indicate larger circulation size). The overwhelming blue on the map may provide fuel to those who decry a liberal media bias, but a great deal of the blue dots have a darker blue circumference, which indicates that those newspapers endorsed Bush in 2004 but now endorse Obama. There are a few red dots with darker red circles, too, indicating papers that endorsed Kerry in 2004 and now endorse McCain. Rather than illustrating a red state/blue state dichotomy, the graph’s creators suggest that it clearly displays an urban/rural split in the electorate, as illustrated in the cartogram below which assigns hues between red and blue to counties based on a percentage of votes to Democrats and Republicans and distorts the map by relative population size.

M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman (creative commons license) - Cartilinear map of 2004 US presidential election results with counties scaled to reflect population size and colors between red and blue to indicate percentage of vote to Democrats and Republicans.

(that map above was used in the logo of the movie Southland Tales, which I cannot endorse whatsoever. Donnie Darko, the director’s previous movie, is well worth a watch.)

(via waxy.org)

M. Scott Brauer - Inside an artist's painting studio in Shanghai, China.

Thanks to 2point8 I found ArtsVote2008, which aims to collect information about Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s various statements about the arts, funding for the arts, and arts education.  While McCain has yet to issue an official campaign statement about the arts, Obama’s is pretty wide-ranging (PDF).  The candidate’s main positions have been summarized in another document (PDF) which I have included below:

http://www.artsactionfund.org/ - Arts Vote 2008 - Summary of US Presdential candidates' positions on the arts.

In a pitifully small statement released by the McCain campaign, the candidate states his position, worth including here in full:

John McCain believes that arts education can play a vital role fostering creativity and expression. He is a strong believer in empowering local school districts to establish priorities based on the needs of local schools and school districts. Schools receiving federal funds for education must be held accountable for providing a quality education in basic subjects critical to ensuring students are prepared to compete and succeed in the global economy. Where these local priorities allow, he believes investing in arts education can play a role in nurturing the creativity of expression so vital to the health of our cultural life and providing a means of creative expression for young people.”

That sounds fine, but it’s 4 relatively meaningless sentences. Lip service. John McCain opposes the existence of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Salt Lake Tribune has great analysis of the two candidate’s positions.

Obama’s arts policy proposal, on the other hand, was called “the most comprehensive platform on the arts” by Arts Action Fund CEO and president Robert Lynch. It provides for the creation of an Artists Corps (which reminds me of the Farm Security Administration, which begat modern photojournalism), national initiatives for funding and recognizing arts achievement, and widespread arts education based on research in Chicago’s failing schools. More than that, freelancers reading this will be interested to note Obama’s recognition of the impossibility of obtaining health insurance as an independent artist outside of traditional employment, noting that his health care policy would make it easier for artists to afford federal health insurance. And our international audience will be happy to learn that Obama’s platform includes explicit provision for cultural artistic exchange, both through funding American artists’ travel and exhibition internationally and through the streamlining of visa processes in order to make the USA an attractive place for international artists to come and create and exhibit their work.