A shot of the crowd at a Bernie Sanders campaign event March 12 on the U. of I. campus, taken by journalism professor Charles Ledford and later published in the Wall Street Journal.
My 5-year-old daughter and I watched Star Wars IV the other night. That’s the original, where the good guys blow up the Death Star. Before the rebel fighters attack, General Dodonna tells his pilots, "The battle station’s defenses are designed around a direct, large-scale assault. A small one-man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defenses. The empire doesn't consider a small one-man fighter to be any threat." As a result of the Empire’s false assumption … well, we know the result.
Rev. Wilson Douglas outside a Ted Cruz rally in Decatur.
While working for various major news organizations as a young photojournalist, I learned that, like the Empire, political campaigns are hierarchical, monolithic and narcissistic organizations. They’re run like the Death Star, and their media strategy is based on rules of engagement set by the campaigns and tilted overwhelmingly in their favor. Photographers enter only with press credentials through a dedicated doorway and are often restricted to a perimeter area. Or they are forced to shoot from a riser in the rear of the room with long telephoto lenses while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with one another. One way the campaigns try to control the message is by making the messengers so homogenous.
U. of I. junior Tanner Bednar outside the Bernie Sanders rally on campus.
My approach to covering the 2016 presidential primaries in Iowa and Illinois for Getty Images was not unlike the Star Wars rebels’ strategy for successfully attacking the Death Star – I was the small one-man fighter the candidates’ media apparatus doesn’t really plan for. I went in stealthily, without press credentials, after standing in line for hours with a candidate’s most ardent devotees. I stayed incognito, carrying very little visible camera gear. I made sure the gear had a decidedly “nonprofessional” look about it. And I dressed the part, wearing camouflage shirts and a baseball cap to Republican events and donning a more … cosmopolitan … wardrobe for the Democratic candidates.
Bill Clinton greeting guests after a campaign event for his wife in Marshalltown, Iowa. The photo was published by The Associated Press.
Consequently, I was able to embed myself not with the homogenized media gaggle but rather with the folks who, for my money, are much more interesting and undoubtedly less scripted than the candidates themselves – people like the duded-up evangelical preacher at a Ted Cruz event, the autograph collectors who hound Bill and Hillary Clinton and the wide-eyed young idealists in the Bernie Sanders crowds.
I was able to hang out with my subjects a bit, establish a rapport and, for a short time, make photographs from within their comfort zone rather than from a place that was both psychologically and physically far removed from it.
Ted Cruz poses for a photo with several attendees at an event in Decorah, Iowa.
Novelist E.L. Doctorow said, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” The photographs I aim to produce are about more than reporting facts. They’re about sharing moods.
This idea that truth is about more than facts is often a difficult thing for the young journalists I teach to get their heads around. Students enter my multimedia classes as visual consumers in a society saturated with images. Their baseline is an assumption that what a thing looks like is a full representation of what that thing is. But journalism is about human beings, and we humans are defined by the relationships in our lives.
Bernie Sanders at a campaign event in Marshalltown, Iowa. The photo was published by The Huffington Post.
Visual consumers become effective visual communicators when they realize that the only photographs that really matter are the ones that show relationships. And making those relational photographs, the ones that evoke sensation in the viewer, is difficult to do if one doesn’t ignore the rules of engagement once in a while.