It's been a week since two million of my newest friends stormed the National Mall and the streets of DC. In these seven days I've had a little time to reflect on my experiences, but now I would like to share with you what I saw and felt that day and the days prior to Tuesday January 20th, the day President Barack Obama took office.
On January 18th the "We Are One" concert was held at the Lincoln Memorial. This opening ceremony featured celebs and politicians, with the Obama and Biden families getting front row tickets to performers like Stevie Wonder and Beyonce. While the general public was held back perhaps a 100 yards or farther, the media area to the side of the stage offered an almost perfect view (exceptions to this included a giant monitor, a traveling press section which remained empty, and an inumerable amount of stage hands who, perhaps subconciously, decided to block my view whenever possible). Although the concert was at 2pm I arrived at 8:30am to find a line of fellow camera men and photogs huddled up in the cold waiting to go through the Secret Service check point. I was lucky enough to secure a spot as close to the stage as possible, and hence the shots were produced that you see below.
Perhaps one of the best things about the concert was not the celebrities in attendance or watching the Obama family throw their hands up to a version of "Shout!" sung impressively well by Garth Brooks (that's right... Garth Brooks), but instead my favorite aspect of the concert was that it was live on HBO, which accomplished a goal seldom reached in Washington during events like this: Punctuality. At the end I packed up my gear and walked three blocks home with the crowd, it was easy. Tuesday, however, turned out to be a different kind of beast entirely.
On the morning of January 20th I woke up at 5am. A week prior I had gone to sleep at that hour. Little needs to be said about waking up that early, and anyone that knows me knows that I love my bed more than most things in life, but despite my parting with the sheets at a God-awful hour I was determined to make good images and experience history for myself. I made it onto the mall at 5:30 ready for anything.
What I was not prepared for was the amount of people that beat me there. At 5:30am thousands had already braced the cold for the day to come, determined to get the best and closest spot they could. Many had slept over on the mall, but with temperatures in the teens or below I can't imagine how. It truly showed the dedication of these people who had traveled so far to see a dream realized and a country shift directions.
By 6:30 roads had already been closed to foot traffic due to overcrowding and things were beginning to fill up. After trying for an hour to get into a closet ticketed section, constantly being told that I had to go farther back on the mall to go forward (good logic, eh?) I decided to scrap the plan and head to a spot between two sections, giving me access to both the crowd packed like sardines against metal barricades as well as to an alright-shot of the Capitol and a couple jumbo-trons.
Now the fun part... the wait. During this time I had an opportunity to reflect on Obama and how much I actually had covered him, and it surprised me. I thought back to my journey in Boston as a high school student during the Democratic Convention when Barack made a surprise entrance at the Massachusetts State House as Barney Frank talked to our group. He waked in and began talking to us just hours before he would give his keynote address to the Convention. This speech would come to define him; that speech made him. In an ironic turn this was my first experience with a camera, when my dad gave me a film canon SLR and 25 rolls of film. I had no idea what I was doing and if I remember correctly, all those pictures of Barack came out extremely blurry.
Fast forward and I had covered him on the campaign trail on several occasions, once at American University with Ted Kennedy and the other time in Manassas, VA in early November; it would be the last speech he would give before election day (photos from that event are also on this blog). I had covered the Denver Convention and sat just 15 rows back for his acceptance address at Invesco Field. In short (too late), I came to realize in that 15 degree whether that my photographic life had come to revolve in sorts around this man that I would now call my President. My passion for still photography had started with him and would continue with him in my focus.
I produced images from this day that, in all honesty, was the best I had to offer. From my vantage point the obvious best photos would come from those that supported him and followed him more than I had, and that is who I decided to shoot. Keep an eye out for an audio slideshow in the near future that could contain these images as well as audio taken on the scene, but I felt it important to get these shots and my thoughts out now, just one week into the Obama White House.
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