Listen up, political junkies and you cave dwellers who ignored Election 2008. With the Obama administration poised to take charge in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, aren't you just a teensy bit nostalgic for those halcyon days last January when the election was still a distant dream? Remember the lines and chatter of caucus night? The Clinton-Obama slugfests in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan? The Republican National Convention in St. Paul? Wardrobe-gate? Joe the Plumber? Pitbulls in lipstick? Change we can believe in?
Even as war raged and the world's financial system tumbled, the election rallied on, speeches rained down, pundits chattered, pollsters questioned, and photographers went out early and late to record the excitement of it all.
Today IFP Minnesota, a St. Paul-based media-arts organization, opens a show of about 40 photos by 11 mostly Minnesota-based photographers who took offbeat, unofficial images of everything from Al Franken jawing around a pot-bellied stove to Gov. Sarah Palin sparkling at the RNC and a mournful tribute to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone. Operating mostly outside official news-and-information channels, the photographers sometimes focused on the principal actors but more often turned their attention to the telling sideshows of the patriotic spectacle -- a mockup of the Oval Office in which visitors could pose behind a replica of President Bush's desk; gas-masked police scowling at skateboarding convention protesters; a candidate in the eye of a television camera.
Excerpts from a recent conversation with the show's curator, Minneapolis photographer Vance Gellert:
Q Aren't people too sick of politics to rehash this election yet again?
A Actually, it's Al Franken and Norm Coleman who are dragging us into boredom. We're celebrating that the system worked, or worked better this time. No one president or party is going to get us out of this mess. We're all going to have to roll up our sleeves and improve, in some small way, those things that concern us. I try to keep that in focus. [This show] is just trying to find a little inspiration for us all in this really messy time.
Q How did it come about?
A Early last summer I put out a call to photographers through various sources, including IFP and the Minnesota Center for Photography [which has since shut down]. I was hoping to find more conceptual pieces, but it's mostly documentary. I was pleased to see that photographers followed politicians everywhere, to polling places and all through the campaign process. Terry [Gydesen] and Alec [Soth] both made it into the RNC, so they have shots of the convention floor.
