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| Click photo to see more 2008 Presidential Campaign images. |
One sign of our digital times is how quickly something can
become a phenomenon. For example, Brett Marty bought his first
digital SLR for a college class two years ago and used it to document
his epic overland journey in an old Buick from San Francisco to the
shores of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego. Last September the
25-year-old filmmaker began photographing presidential campaign
events in battleground states for the white-hot political blog
Fivethirtyeight.com. Today he's probably the most-viewed photographer of the 2008 election.
Don't believe it? Consider that on election day alone the
Progressive poll-analysis site got almost 3 million hits. The Flickr
photo server hosting Marty's photographs was nearly overwhelmed by
traffic from Fivethirtyeight that night and embargoed his pictures
indefinitely. (They are available now at BrettMarty.com.)
What's not in doubt is that Marty is the first photographer
to take an open-ended self-assignment with a news blog and end up six weeks later with credentials for the national press corps. In doing
so, he and Sean Quinn, Fivethirtyeight's lone reporter, logged over
14,000 miles through 15 states, covering what
political junkies call the ground game: the cadres of local
volunteers and organizers in both parties, working to get out the
vote.
Their partnership began in late summer. Marty finished a
documentary feature project and, swept up by election-year politics,
was looking for something to do. He emailed Quinn, already on the
road in Carson City, Nevada, to ask if he needed a photographer. The two had never met.
Quinn says several photographers contacted him, but "Brett's
e-mail stood out. I saw his pictures from Argentina on his website
and realized he's someone who knows how to travel the way I do. We
hit it off on the phone right away, and he could leave the next day."
He drove the 200 miles to San Francisco to pick Marty up and start a
journey that did not end until they covered president-elect Obama's
first press conference nearly two months later.
Equipped with two Apple Powerbooks, cell phones, a broadband
wireless modem, and the same Nikon D80 body and standard 18-135mm lens Marty took to Argentina, the pair spent every waking hour on the job, one driving while the other wrote, edited photos, or planned the next day's itinerary.
Marty says they researched past election results and new
voter registration figures to find communities where the Obama and
McCain campaigns were concentrating their efforts. "We could kind of
figure out the battleground counties and we'd go see what was going
on in them." Both campaigns listed their field offices on line.
"Usually the smaller the area and the less frequently they had to
deal with the media, the more accepting and open they were to us."
Fivethirtyeight's traffic grew exponentially through October
as Marty and Quinn filed their sometimes twice-daily reports. "At the beginning of the trip, half the campaign organizers wouldn't know
what Fivethirtyeight was, but after a week or two everybody knew who
we were, which made it fun," says Marty. The pair also gained press access to rallies
by both candidates and their running mates. "That was something we
got better at as we went along," Quinn says. "We learned who to talk
to."
Days could be brutally long, starting sometimes before dawn
and ending after midnight, with hundreds of miles in between. Marty
fondly recalls a day in Ohio when he photographed an Obama rally in
Dayton, Ohio and an appearance by Sarah Palin hours later in Wilmington, Delaware. "I could easily take 800 pictures at one event," Marty says, making his daily editing process "a big headache."
In looking for pictures, Marty quickly discovered campaign
offices were mostly alike. "But there were always unique things, like
homemade posters, so I would start taking pictures of whatever I
hadn't seen before." Though working for a liberal political site,
they strove for evenhanded coverage. If Obama volunteers predominate in his work, Marty says, it's because the winner had by far the bigger ground game.
Marty says he relished the chance to produce photo work
beyond "the one money shot that would be the iconic news photo of the day. I was able to put up 30 or 40 pictures of a rally, to give a
feel for what was going on." Indeed, Marty's ground-level photographs
are evidence that our politics is not the freak show big media likes
to present, but rather the work of sincere and dedicated citizens who
volunteer for the challenging and energizing task of electing our
leaders.
Marty and Quinn financed the trip themselves, often staying
with Fivethirtyeight readers who followed their progress and offered
guest rooms. "We were both pretty sure it would pay off in the end,"
Marty says. And it has. Fivethirtyeight's success allowed founder
Nate Silver to reimburse his reporters' expenses. Quinn is planning a
book and, at this writing, Marty has four exhibitions in the works.
Looking ahead, Marty says he might go to Washington. "I think
the model is there for a blog press photographer now for the first
time. I'd like to go back to filmmaking, but it would be hard to
pass up the momentum Fivethirtyeight generated."
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