Princeton, NJ, October 31, 2008

My older daughter drew the Obama/Biden logo, my younger daughter a traditional pumpkin face.  They scooped out the innards and I cut to their drawings.  The third pumpkin is for Bix (our dog.)  He expressed no interest in having it carved.

Obama, McCain and undecided?  Sometimes it just works out that way…

Shot with a Canon G10 that arrived this afternoon.  It’s a little point & shoot that may turn out to be the Leica of its day.

Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Karemm Rashad Sultan Khan.
Photograph by Platon, from the portfolio, Service, as run in the New Yorker, 09/29/08.

This morning former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a moving endorsement of Barack Obama.  Within the endorsement he cited the photo above and finally said what many US politicians should be saying to counter the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the McCain Campaign and the Republican Party.

Colin Powell:

…I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian.  He’s always been a Christian.  But the really right answer is, what if he is?  Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America.  Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?  Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine.  It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave.  And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone.  And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death.  He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith.  And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey.  He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.  Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way.  And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know.  But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions…

If you read or watch all of Powell’s endorsement the Platon photograph was clearly not the deciding factor in his viewpoint.  Powell developed his position after watching events for some time and interacting directly with both candidates.  The photograph, though, for him provides a touchstone and a way to point out the hypocrisy within his party.  That the photo is not a traditional news photo, is obviously staged and lit theatrically, is very interesting.  The situation itself, a photo and how it crosses paths with a presidential campaign is also of note, especially in light of the Greenberg/McCain dust up.

I don’t know that Platon’s Service portfolio got a lot of buzz in the photo world when it was published.  I sensed more reaction in the photo community to Platon’s now being a staffer at The New Yorker than to the photo series.  I don’t think that many beyond regular readers of the magazine were aware of the photos.  The series is quite moving and for someone like myself who knew of Platon for his Clinton portrait and thought of him as the portraitist who shoots from low angles – the series did make me see him in a new light.

You can’t predict when something like this happens – a photo is cited by a significant person, at an important moment, on a national scale.  It begs the question though – if you did a series of photos and it had to affect or convince just one person who would it be?

Platon’s Service Portfolio

Colin Powell

Full Transcript of Powell’s Endorsement

Barack Obama

New home page image; nighttime pickup soccer game.

Paul Krugman, Princeton, NJ, March 29, 2006

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and a columnist for the New York Times, has won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics.  I photographed Paul in March of 2006.

"Men's Race", Late 1930's, Ridgeway, Iowa, Everett "Scoop" Kuntz

Great article in The New York Times this morning about Everett “Scoop” Kuntz. As a teenager in the late 1930′s he acquired a 35mm Argus AF camera and began to document the life around him.  Ridgeway is a small farming community, population 300 (then and now.)  Scoop could not afford to have any of the images printed so he stored the negatives in a box and forgot about them until 60 years later.  Scoop passed away in 2003 but the images brought him some solace as he fought cancer during his last years.

Now the University of Iowa Press has published the photos as the book, “Sunday Afternoon on the Porch:  Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942.”  The New York Times has a photo gallery in addition to the article.

It’s obviously interesting as a document of a small town some seventy years ago but it’s also interesting in light of the switch to digital.  One wonders if then was now and Scoop had made his images digitally would they still be around to find, in a box in the basement, seventy years later?  Would they be on a disc or a memory card?  Would it be clear what was there?  Would there be some way to retrieve and read the images or would storage or file formats have moved on many generations rendering the images irretrievable?

George Washington Bridge and New York City, October 2, 2008

Driving back from New York City last week, fading color, cooler temps, crisper light.  Fall is in the air.