The inauguration of President Barack Obama has been this week’s most popular topic. This event has spurred the creativity of many entrepreneurs who have brought us everything from Obama cupcakes, to Obama action figures, to Obama condoms that include instructions to “use with good judgment.”

In light of this momentous occasion, Aperture Foundation is thrilled to present a sneak preview of a special limited-edition portfolio in celebration of President Obama’s first steps as America’s 44th President.

The man behind these revealing prints is renowned Magnum photographer Martin Parr, who presents his own original and entertaining view on the subject through his collection of unusual objects.

Aperture, in collaboration with Janet Borden gallery, is offering a portfolio of four prints, available at special pre-publication price of $1,250, with an edition of 50 copies.

Click here to see the whole portfolio and to reserve your copy of this exclusive edition now.

Longtime Aperture designer, Andrew Sloat, sends us his latest video celebrating today’s inauguration and the Oath of Office. Enjoy!

Article 2 (for BHO) from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo.

Election Day, November 4, 2008. Jack’s Valley, Douglas County, Nevada. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Image & Reality

I felt early on, from age 10 or so, that a big part of politics was emotional, and had everything to do with the collective imagination and memory. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was 10, and those images remain indelible. My first electoral politics excitement came from the insurgent candidacy of Bobby Kennedy, and those images too have never faded. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, and then Bobby, in 1968, I was 15, and I never stopped mourning those losses, until November 4, 2008. Forty years later, I feel that excitement again. Electoral politics seems possible again. That’s a long time to wait, a long time to be outside, and I’ll admit it feels very strange to be back after all this time.

If Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were still alive, they would be 79 and 83 years old, respectively. Think about how much different the intervening years would have been if they hadn’t been killed. As a political tactic to influence democratic process, terrorism doesn’t work—but assassination does.

The politics of fear and resentment that has largely determined electoral politics in America for the last forty years just lost. Nixon and Reagan lost. Lee Atwater and his protégé Karl Rove lost, decisively. “Triangulators” like the Democratic Leadership Council lost. The change—and in American democracy, change is still a choice—is palpable. People are moving differently on the street, and sounding different when they speak.

A few days after Obama won, some people began to publicly wonder whether this was “only a symbolic victory,” or constituted real change. This question seems to me to reveal a singular misreading of the present moment. Yes, this is a symbolic victory, but it is one in an environment where symbols matter more than ever. Symbolic change is real change.

It was necessary, in this campaign, to change the way people thought about electoral politics, to create a new image of it. In the recent past, right-wing Republicans had gotten themselves into position to govern by seizing the public imaginary and by controlling images. They turned out to be extremely good at this.

To defeat them, it was necessary to reclaim the public imaginary, to change the symbolic order. Now Obama and his team are in position to govern, to change policy, and they must do so swiftly and decisively, but they must continue to pay attention to the image. In their second term, Bush & Co. neglected the image, gave up on the public imaginary, and ruled with brute force and fiat. Obama can never do that. There are hard times ahead, and we are going to need images to unite us.

In the campaign, Obama had a particular problem that few politicians ever face: he became too popular. At one point, the level of public adulation rose so precipitously that it threatened to get out of control. The opposition (first Clinton, then McCain) took note, and their image of Obama as a callow celebrity—all style and no substance—briefly took hold.

Then, in Denver, in a stadium filled to bursting with 84,000 of his most ardent supporters, high on their own rightness and growing strength, I saw Obama dial back the charisma and cool the image, to make it more convincing for the 40 million people watching the speech on small screens in living rooms, many of whom did not know him well and had not yet made up their minds. He controlled the image, in order to get into position. When this kind of understanding and self-control comes together with great intelligence and a genuine will to change things for the better, many seemingly impossible things become possible again.

If Obama continues to honor this confluence, he will become not just the most unlikely candidate ever to win an American presidential campaign, but one of the greatest presidents we have ever had.

Filed on Monday, November 17, 2008, after the 60 Minutes interview.

Obama Campaign Rally, Marriott Hotel & Convention Center, Coralville,
Iowa. October 7, 2007. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

I Put This Floor in This House

The political campaign ad for television is certainly one of the most degraded forms of public communication we have. It was base to begin with, built on a tissue of half-truths, innuendoes, and outright lies, and designed to appeal to our worst tendencies: fear, greed, insecurity, and selfishness. Most of the ads aired by both sides in this presidential campaign have been negative hits on one’s opponent.

Until last night, when, six days before the election and flush with more donated money than any candidate in history has had at his disposal, Barack Obama bought thirty minutes on prime-time TV, right before what turned out to be the final game of the World Series, to make a final pitch to American voters.

It begins with an image of American beauty and bounty: a field of Kansas wheat blowing in the wind. Then a traveling shot of the prairie as the voice-over begins, “With each passing month, our country’s faced increasingly difficult times . . . .” The candidate then appears, already at home in a less austere version of the Oval Office, and sits on the edge of his desk to speak to us. He’ll tell us the stories of four working families and their struggles, and what an Obama presidency will do to help them. “Everybody here has got a story.”

The structure of the ad is consistent and sound. Each family’s story is followed by Obama’s policy proposals to address their issues. These are the problems, and these are the solutions. There are moments of great subtlety and effect, as when Larry Stewart, retired after working thirty years on the railroad, sits in his house in Sardinia, Ohio, and says, “I put this floor in this house.” When he retired ten years ago, he lost his health insurance and had to take a job at Wal-Mart at age 72, as an “associate salesman.” “In other words,” he says, “I just sell stuff, that’s all.” That is, I don’t make things anymore, like I built this house. I just sell stuff, cheap, that other people now make elsewhere in the world, to other Americans like me who can’t afford to buy stuff we make ourselves anymore. And we are told that this is now our work, to consume, to buy and sell stuff we don’t make to each other. This is what we’ve been reduced to, far away from “an economy that honors the dignity of work.”

Each family story, from Kansas City, Missouri, Sardinia, Ohio, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Louisville, Kentucky, tells a part of the catastrophe we’ve been led into: forty-seven million people without health insurance, $10 billion a month in Iraq, and an economy built on easy money, debt, and consumption.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are never mentioned in this ad. George W. Bush is never mentioned. It’s not about them. It’s not even about Barack Obama. It’s about us. The entire ad, from amber waves of grain to God bless America, is about the idea of us, and what would happen if we decided to take back our country.

One of the marks of a world-class practitioner is that he can take a degraded form and breathe new life into it. Political analysts will be talking about this ad for a very long time, because it transcends the form.

But it doesn’t transcend reality. All of these stories of people who are hurting now are haunted by the realization that more pain is on the way. The current financial crisis will certainly lead to terrible economic effects over the first term of the Obama presidency. The real pain hasn’t even started yet. It’s going to be bad, and it’s going to be worst for poor and working-class families. To get through it at all, people are going to have to come together to enter a “new era of responsibility,” and abandon the politics of resentment and fear that have reigned over the last eight years.

“In six days, we can choose hope over fear and unity over division. . . . In six days we can come together as one nation and one people, and once more choose our better history. That’s what’s at stake.”

Filed on Thursday, October 30 , 2008.

McCain Nation Presidential Debate Watch Party, Walnut Creek, California.
October 15, 2008. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Autism on the Rise

John McCain has the worst timing of any politician in recent memory. Eight years ago, he was the most popular political figure in America. Shot down by the Bush/Rove team’s dirty tricks in 2000, he was later forced, Stockholm Syndrome-style, to embrace them. Now, after eight years of a Republican administration that will be remembered as among the worst in American history, McCain and his ideas are irrevocably yoked to that catastrophic cart. His statement Wednesday night that “I am not President Bush,” echoed Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” in its bitterness and irony.

Rather than moving toward the center to convince independent and undecided voters (who used to be part of his natural constituency) to vote for him, McCain instead swerved to the right, choosing a polarizing vice-presidential candidate that can only help him on the lunatic fringe, and mounting a negative campaign that attempts to revive the cultural battles of the 1960s at a time when a collapsing economy has voters focused only on the immediate present and future, not the past.

To rely exclusively on the old Republican rhetoric of cutting taxes and shrinking government at this point, when government is the only protection against collapsing markets, indicates a dangerous misreading of political realities. McCain is fighting the wrong war at the wrong time. More and more, he exhibits an abnormal subjectivity, marching to his own maverick drummer as it leads him and his supporters over a cliff.

Watching McCain in the final debate, I was reminded of Bob Dole in 1996, another highly skilled and successful senator who was drastically out of step with the changing times, and made bitter by the knowledge that he’d repeatedly missed his presidential moment. When John McCain looks at Barack Obama, he sees the future, and it galls him. You can see it in his eyes. Bob Schieffer was trying to help McCain by setting him up for his litany of attacks against Obama, but all it did was display the older man’s desperation and impotence. McCain looked better than he has in months in the first forty minutes of the debate, but if this had been a prize fight, Schieffer would have stepped in and thrown up his hands to protect McCain an hour into it.

Filed on Friday, October 16 , 2008, after the third and final presidential debate.

Obama Debate Watch party, Jack’s Valley, Douglas County, Nevada.
October 7, 2008. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Overhead Projector

Acting partly out of desperation and partly out of hubris, John McCain chose to walk into a fair, refereed fight tonight in Nashville and try to go head-to-head on the issues with Barack Obama. This was a reckless, arrogant, possibly fatal mistake.

Granted, this was supposed to be McCain’s format. He’s done hundreds, maybe thousands of these “town meeting” style appearances, and he feels comfortable in this setting. But from the opening coin toss, Obama had the edge in this one, speaking clearly and convincingly about his new policies and about McCain’s failed ones: “He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked and we need fundamental change.” McCain revealed his one new proposal (to stabilize home values by buying up bad home loans) in his first minute, and his timing was shot from then on. His jokes fell flat and he couldn’t connect with the questioners in the audience, Tom Brokaw, or Barack Obama. To conceal his reluctance to face his opponent and look him in the eye, McCain retreated to his stool after each speech and pretended to write furiously in a notebook. When Obama wasn’t speaking, he sat confidently, looking directly at McCain. Obama was more aggressive here than in the first debate, but he never hit McCain when he was down. And McCain was down a lot.

This debate made it clear that John McCain and the Republicans are in the same position that John Kerry and the Democrats were in 2004. By accepting the basic terms of Obama’s original message of change, all McCain has to offer now is a watered-down version of what his opponent is proposing. If voters can get the real thing with Obama, why should they choose a less vigorous form of it with McCain?

Outside the debate, McCain and Palin have gone negative with a vengeance, recycling the old Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres guilt-by-association smears against Obama. This race- and radical-baiting is an attempt to resuscitate the old Vietnam War era animosities, to energize the base. The trouble for the Republicans is that the people who are going to put Obama over the top if they come out in force next month weren’t even born in 1968. The time has run out on this tactic, and it is rapidly running out on John McCain.

Filed on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, after the second presidential debate, in Nashville, TN.

Obama Rally, Washington Square Park, NYC, September 2007. Photo by Terrence Jennings

Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs
Curated by Deborah Willis & Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe

Exhibition on view: September 19, 2008 – November 8, 2008
Leica Gallery
670 Broadway
New York, New York

This exhibition documents and describes a transformation; it expresses the range of emotions expressed by the subjects in the photographs since February 10, 2007, the day on which Barack Obama announced that he would run for President. This exhibit highlights, through some 100 photographs, the road to Barack Obama’s historic nomination as the first black American to lead the Presidential ticket of a major party.

Also, join Deborah Willis and her son, Hank Willis Thomas, in conversation at Aperture Gallery on November 11, 6:30 p.m. Thomas’ first monograph, Pitch Blackness, was just published by Aperture.

August 28, 2008. Democratic National Convention. Invesco Field, Mile High Stadium, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Allen Spore.

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

As we approached Mile High Stadium on the press bus at 3 p.m., we looked out to see tens of thousands of people walking in columns, filling the roads, elevated highways, and bridges, streaming toward the arena. We were told that some of these people started walking five hours ago, to get here on time. Inside, the TV networks were already set up on platforms erected around the stage. Security was relatively light, and our Brooklyn Rail credentials got us all the way inside, onto the field, where we stayed for the entire spectacle.

Over the next six hours the scene inside the stadium gradually changed, but it was clear from the beginning that this gathering was very different from those at the Pepsi Center the previous three nights. Down on the field, politicians and celebrities mixed freely with the press. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and John Lewis all held court, surrounded by a gaggle of cameras and microphones. Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff were busy interviewing and being interviewed. At one point, it seemed that everybody was interviewing everyone else, except Charlie Rose, who strolled around smiling, taking it all in.

As the stands began to fill up, the most enthusiastic celebrators came down closest to the field and began dancing, waving signs and banners, and chanting. Some groups developed elaborate routines that caught the attention of the photographers and TV people on the field, and the tables turned: the stands became the stage. The mood was buoyant and expectant. Everyone was having a good time.

Up to now, this convention has consisted of roughly 5000 delegates and 20,000 media people. Today, these groups are outnumbered two-to-one by more than 50,000 regular citizens, who are more diverse in age, color, and class, reflecting the demographic shift in the electorate that might just make an Obama presidency possible.

At about 5:30, will.i.am took the stage to do a version of his “Yes We Can” sampling YouTube hit, and the crowd came together. Looking at them, I realized that this was no conventional political party crowd. These were new people, coming into something they had no doubt was their own. They weren’t asking for anything. They were claiming, and were here to celebrate, what was theirs.

I don’t think the Democratic Party, per se, gets this. They are proceeding as if this is just another campaign, and that’s fine with the Obama people. They need the Democrats. But this time, to win, they’re going to need something else.

When the film about Obama’s life began, this capacity crowd of 84,000 fell absolutely silent. Not a sound. And when their candidate appeared on stage, they erupted, causing the stadium to shudder under our feet.

This was not the best speech Obama has given. It wasn’t even the best speech given at this convention. There was little in the speech that he hadn’t said before in the campaign. I think “No Drama Obama” (as his staff calls him) actually took something off of his delivery, in order to keep things real and play against the spectacular setting. After all, this speech was not primarily for the people in the stadium. It was for the record 38 million people at home who tuned in to see it.

But this in no way lessened the effect on the crowd at Mile High Stadium. When Obama spoke of the debacle of the last eight years of American politics and said “We’re better than this,” people knew he meant them. They don’t love him because they think he’s better than them. The love him because he makes them want to be better themselves. And they know that it’s no use blaming Bush/Cheney and Co. for what’s happened to our country. They were just doing what they do. But we need to recognize and mourn what we did and didn’t do to stop them, and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Obama says “Enough!”

Al Gore is right about one thing. The real power in this country is afraid of an Obama presidency, and will do their best to prevent it. The only way to overcome that is through sheer political will, extremely effective communication, and the force of numbers.

Filed Thursday, August 28, 2008, after the final night of the convention at Mile High Stadium.