I took Obama’s favorite 2008 photo
What drew him to my static little image?
In the wee hours of election night a dozen years ago, I took a photograph that probably ranks among the least exciting pictures I’ve made in my 35-year career. It shows 26 people standing in a steady drizzle on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, all gathered in the dark around a single transistor radio.
Yet the moment I pressed my shutter, I knew I had captured something special. In a longish exposure because of the dark, it felt as if I had recorded a sliver of our republic for posterity, like one of of those slightly blurry portraits of Abraham Lincoln himself. You just stare through the grain and blur, waiting for wisdom or guidance to emerge.
The quietness of that photo — it’s pretty much the opposite of what we expect from a victory celebration — has always seemed to resonate with people. Now, in his new memoir, former President Barack Obama has singled it out: “My favorite photograph from that night isn’t of Grant Park at all. Rather it’s one I received many years later as a gift, a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial, taken as I was giving my speech in Chicago. It shows a small gathering of people on the stairs, their faces obscured by the darkness, and behind them the giant figure shining brightly, his marble face craggy, his eyes slightly downcast. They’re listening to the radio, I am told, quietly contemplating who we are as a people — and the arc of this thing we call democracy.”
It’s not every day that a former president cites your work, and certainly not in one of the most anticipated books in recent memory. Even more, Obama had one of the most celebrated personal photographers ever, Pete Souza. What drew him to my static little image?
What has been lost
Having had a few days to process the thousands of emails I’ve received (50 calls from my mother alone), I think I might know. And the reason goes straight to the heart of what has transpired in our country since that night, and what has been lost.
First, some logistics. The genesis of the image was, silly enough, my sofa. For two decades as a photojournalist — including nine years at this newspaper — I covered historic events: Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s swearing-in ceremony, earthquakes in California. But on this night, I was sitting on the couch watching CNN, having traded in my photojournalist credentials for wedding photography. Looking back, I screwed up: I really missed journalism.
At 11 p.m., as CNN anchors gushed about the throngs at Grant Park and the White House, I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped up and said to my wife, Maya, “I gotta go.”
“Where?” she asked in disbelief. “I don’t know! I gotta go and make a picture of something.”
The Lincoln Memorial seemed like the obvious place on the night America elected its first Black president: Lincoln himself, Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr. And as I approached, I expected to find a crowd of thousands.
I found two dozen. A TV cameraman leaving the scene shook his head at me. Nothing to see here, he said.
The first thing that struck me was the radio, more 1958 than 2008. Then, the quiet. No one was speaking. Not more than a mile away, tens of thousands of people were screaming their lungs out. But here, just a voice coming through a little radio.
‘I Have a Dream’
One of the emails I’ve received is from Anne Junod, who’s frozen in a bit of blur on the steps just beneath Lincoln. Anne was just out of college when she and two friends jumped in a car: “When the election was called for Obama, we knew we had to get down to the Lincoln Memorial. We were sure there would be thousands of people rushing to the place where MLK Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. We wanted to take in the history and sanctity of this night in the place of greatest significance, where MLK Jr. cast his vision for a moment such as this.”
“We didn’t go to the White House because Obama wasn’t there yet,” Anne explained. “This moment wasn’t about Obama in the White House. It was about the ... struggle that got him there, the work for which is not complete.”
Anne and her friends wanted to honor our nation’s progress. I wanted to be a journalist again. We went to the Lincoln that night because that’s its purpose: We all make a pilgrimage there at some point to quietly contemplate our democracy, as Obama wrote.
Looking at the picture today, it’s not just the radio that feels a bit ancient. People react to my photograph because it represents a time that feels lost amid the current divisiveness and screaming and shoving.
We long for quiet, we long for contemplation, we worry for our democracy. When people see this photo, it reminds them of those things.