Re: A room for everybody

["Charles E. Albertson" <chucko@ricochet.net>]

At 05:28 PM 11/22/96 -0800, you wrote:
>One of my colleagues went to the USA some weeks ago to cover the
>presidential election. At an election meeting Bill Clinton's press
>officer said to the photographers: "Gentlemen, you shoot at 1/125,
>aperture 5.6, focal length 85mm..." If you picked up a 28mm to make a
>different photo, you were excluded. Simply like that.
>
>The power of a photographer is found out of the field. The political
>establishment in USA have very well understood this. I always find the
>sense of my photos to the left or to the right of the subject (or what
>is presented). If I am obliged to use a 85mm lens, I will make the same
>photo as everybody else. This is not interesting at all.
>
	Some people may find Oddmund's colleague's account a bit hard to swallow,
but this sort of behavior is not unheard of in packs of photographers, both
in the US and the UK, especially where everyone is confined to one place
(common at campaign appearances). As I've heard the stories, though, it's
usually been one of the photographers that "prescribes" the lens to use,
not a press officer for the candidate, and nobody got the boot for using a
shorter lens, unless they ran up into everyone else's shot to frame their
own. It doesn't leave much room for a different viewpoint, except for folks
like P.F. Bentley (who gained very good access to the back rooms of
Clinton's 1992 campaign) and Mary Ellen Mark (who I heard was doing the
same with Dole's campaign).
	Perhaps some of the folks on the list who've done a lot of campaign
coverage can comment further. I like to shoot my own stuff at political
events, but I usually find the people in the crowds more interesting than
the candidates.

Chuck Albertson
Seattle, Wash.