The Chosen Ones

This one's about memory.
Today, being a memorable day, Obama's Inauguration Day, I figured it to be an excellent reason to post an update. Much has happened today, and this Inauguration would be a dream come true for any photographer. I watched and taped the Inauguration ceremony at home. I watched the scene on the Mall, tried my best to ignore the empty commentary from Katie Couric, wondered if Michelle Obama's coat was thick enough, and...whenever he was in the frame...gawked at The Photographer. There seemed to be one guy, shooting everything...with one camera. My thought was, "He only has one lens? Is he a Congressman with a really nice Nikon? Did I meet him at a lecture?" Honestly, I would only want to photograph what that one guy, The Photographer, could see. Had I gone to D.C., I would have indeed brought my own Nikon to document my experience, but it would have only been to document the experience.

Photography is a gift, and then there are those special sub-gifts within. Photojournalism is one gift I find fascinating, in that the best photographs are taken to basically document a moment. The idea can be that simple, but the best photographs also revere that moment. In the unbiased realm of journalism, they can translate the importance, and emotion of history. For me, those are the best ones. Without this sense, documenting for the sake of memory sometimes seems wasteful and frustrating. The camera is no longer a tool for communication, but a storage unit. And with this sense, how compelling could those photographs be?

I'm not positive that if I were to have the perspective of The Photographer, that my photographs of Obama would be more significant than my photographs of the millions of supporters who risked hypothermia to see him sworn in. People were having a lot of fun out there, despite the deep freeze, and that would have been nice to remember. I do know that as a photographer, I can ruin a memory by being frustrated at not being able to capture a moment perfectly. It becomes a chase, and before you know it, the moment is over and you're in a corner shuffling through your playback to try and see if you got anything that was...well, maybe that's just me and my Type A issues. Let me leave it there.

I'll just say it simply.

Today was an excellent day, and I have it on film.