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Flickr and the President-Elect: Behind the scenes on Election Night

While professional photojournalists often get the most incredible shots, which discerning photo editors then cull through and present to us the most incisive of the bunch, what happens when there's no "professional" around to capture history?

This has often been the case throughout the last 169 years, ever since the birth of the photographic medium. And even more so since the masses popularized photography as a cultural phenomenon--ever since flexible film was developed by George Eastman in 1885 and sold by his company along with the soon-to-be ubiquitous camera, the Kodak Brownie (slogan: "you press the button, we do the rest"). Once everyone and their brother started running around with their little black boxes filled with rolled film, we started accumulate a record of the lives normal, interesting, boring, and even exceptional people.

Well, Flickr has been around for a long while now (it's probably a hundred years old in Internet Years), and it's the flexible film of the 21st century. "Isn't the digital camera a better applicant to the "new flexible film" moniker", you ask? Not really. Before photo-sharing sites like Flickr, I would say that while, yes, the digital camera allowed you to very easily take LOTS of images, that wasn't really any different than what you could do with flexible film-based cameras (although digital cameras made "processing" the images a lot cheaper).

No, Flickr is more of a game-changer than the digital camera. Why? Because it allowed people to easily share their images (even ones scanned in from "real" photos made with film). It also allowed the rest of us to find those photos we were interested in. Combined with some interesting search-and-show algorithms for presenting images with more "interestingness" to us, those abilities make Flickr a witness to the history, both sacred and profane, both amazing and mundane, that is being made around each of us, every day.

And now we get to the title of this post. While there have been some great photos of the presidential contenders this year, There's been one candidate that--very early on--got their own flickr account, and started documenting their journey to the White House: Barack Obama. The images that show up in Obama's flickrstream are (almost certainly) not taken by him, but by the people around him: campaign staff that follow him from town to town, local organizers who pass along shots of work being done in small towns and big cities, and perhaps a professional or near-professional photographer or two, as well (David Katz took these, and many more in the flickrstream...anyone know anything about him?).

This has given us a wonderful peek behind the curtain of a campaign's facade. A very closely-managed and controlled peek, of course--these shots were vetted at some level by the campaign, and shouldn't be considered to be objective (as if that term has any real meaning in photography). Despite that caveat, Obama's Flickr photos show him at times when no other cameras are around. Case in point was the scene in their hotel room at the Hilton in Chicago, on Election Night, as the networks called the race for Obama. The photos aren't always properly exposed, the framing isn't necessarily graceful, but they give the world a glimpse of the back room of history, as it's being made. We got some great images from that night, and because of Flickr, some nice insights into the more private moments, as well.

Labels: flickr, photography, politics

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