Catalog Cleaning

The cold this week sapped most of my will to wander around with a camera, so I decided to get a jump start on spring cleaning. I spent most of the time resleeving negatives and trying to find better options for archival binders, but I also spent some time backing up my digital catalog. Maintenance of digital storage is always a little annoying; it’s a combination checking the health of multiple drives, backing them up, fighting with a certain company’s cloud storage, and trying to determine the value of having some photos easily accessible while having others backed up and put away. It necessitates some retrospection, and will probably encourage some updating of the rest of my site before too long.

While paring down some of my stuff from last year, I realized the largest proportion of it was what I shot of the Jeff Jackson campaign in North Carolina over the summer. It was definitely a change from what I normally shoot, but it was also an absolute joy. I put in about 1000 miles across the state, traveling between townhalls that ran the gamut of a dozen attendees to a couple hundred. Getting to know Jeff and a couple of the people working on the campaign over those months was great, and highlighted the human part of campaigning that I feel gets overshadowed in most reporting.

Jeff would frequently show up, walk around the crowd shaking hands and getting names, then normally someone from the local party would make a short introduction and hand the “stage” to Jeff. In the public sphere, the handshakes and smiles are the foremost consideration. Campaigns and media alike portray politicking that way because it’s what readers and constituents expect. Even looking back at the pictures I made, the majority of them fit into the framing of, “Voter talks, politician listens. Politician talks, voters listen.” Part of that comes down to access. For smaller campaigns you won’t have a reporter embedded for months on end largely because local media doesn’t have the budget for that anymore. If a candidate has a large enough profile to drive national coverage it is most often either a short piece about the horse race or a longer form article about the horses in the race. What often gets lost in the shuffle is the connections at smaller townhalls like these.

Having the opportunity to experience these townhalls as someone who wasn’t a staffer, reporter, or potential voter, let me feel like I had enough distance to see it a little differently, and looking back at some of the images I made I realized I was letting that perspective slip in between the handshakes and laugh lines. Attendees were frequently looking for some kind of answer to the problems they knew one person couldn’t solve. A woman in Davidson County questioning the state of our politics six month down the road from 1/6. A man in Yadkin County fighting with insurance, medicare, and poor healthcare access for a end of life care for a loved one. A woman in Sanford County trying to organize programs for LGBTQIA+ youth to find community and acceptance in the rural South. A Veteran in Cabarrus County asking for more conversation on gun control and mental healthcare access. Nearly every townhall I photographed had at least one attendee who spoke up on an issue passionately enough that it found resonance in the other attendees, and it was hard not to see that reflected in Jeff or his staff. It was a little bit of projection on my part but I found myself frequently shooting through the crowd looking for an empathetic face, at Jeff’s townhalls and in the political photography I’ve done since then.

I haven’t had the opportunity to shoot much political work since moving up north, in part because of Covid but mostly because of where we are in the political calendar. Hopefully things calm down enough in the summer that I can catch a few townhalls and start to flesh some of these thoughts out a bit more.