Since its invention in the nineteenth century, still photography has illuminated our world and our times with a lucid, often startling potency. Now, in our media-saturated digital age, the power of a single iconic image to reveal or condemn, celebrate or catalyze, remains more critical than ever. This is particularly true in the modern political arena, where most everything is staged for the complicit eye of the television camera. Television and elections have always had a simpatico relationship. Simply put, the great journey to election day makes for good viewing. The candidates and their handlers arrange stump speeches and meet-and-greets with grand rallies and hometown parades, and the television news corps dutifully beam it all out to the voting masses. Yet it is the nature of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that what is televised is transient—here today, replaced tomorrow—and essential truths often get left outside the “official” perimeters.

Over the years the technology of television has evolved in leaps and bounds, but the visual record it produces of the political 
narrative remains limited by the very objectivity it strives so fervently to achieve. With television, what you get is what you see. 
The photojournalist, however, “sees” in an entirely different way. Although the basic aim of photojournalism is reportage, its practitioners operate on a plane wherein subjectivity is a prerequisite for delving beyond the obvious. Armed with their still 
cameras, they set out to supplement, or sometimes even supplant, the televised version of history-in-the-making with their own point of view. Whether roving the sidelines of a press conference or immersed deep within the fray of a convention, the photojournalist can separate the extraordinary from the mundane with the click of a shutter.

The still photographs on display in this exhibition are the product of factors both circumstantial and personal: fortuity, an intrepid spirit, and the myriad split-second decisions involving composition, choice of lens, and balance of light and shadow. Culled from elections both here in the U.S. and abroad, these images represent the vision and skill of men and women dedicated to achieving the transparency essential to any true democracy. Long after the ballots have been counted, and the television cameras pointed elsewhere, it is the work of the photojournalist that serves as the permanent, legitimizing chronicle of how we choose to be governed.

Allen Glover
Assistant Curator
The Paley Center for Media