Pennsylvania Primary - A Photo Essay

Full disclosure – I really have no idea what a "photo essay" is, but it sounds good and it seems to fit what I'm doing. Any professors of photo-essayology who are reading this, please just calm down.


Wait, here it is:

photo essay; (FOE-toe ESS-ayy) n. (fr. Roman esophagus photographus) Definition: a buncha pictures

I was in Philadelphia last night to cover the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary last night, and I divided my time between documenting the goings-on and participating in them. I took a lot of pictures. After the jump, you can see them all, along with my brief reflections on each. Be sure to check out Videos of the Week on Sunday to see my video package, including The Obama Sobriety Test.

I met a lot of photographers last night, and invariably the introduction would go like this:

Me: So, are you a writer?

Photographer: No, I'm just a photographer.

I still can't figure out if this was some kind of inferiority complex, or did they mean it in the David Lee Roth sense of the word. This is Joe, a Reuters photog and Canadian expat.

The Secret Service was there to keep me safe.

I met a lot of people, including several true-life ink-stained wretches, to whom I paid respectful tribute. I also met media people from Japan, the UK, and Norway.

I also met some voters, including Elaine, who started this primary undecided, but who has made her decision by now, and "Jingly Dude," who jingled a lot from his many piercings. and who is voting for Dave Grohl. I communed with the residents of "Obama Island," and a lone Hillary supporter who was marooned with an Obamite. There was even one who had the nerve to exuberantly burst into the press room singing Hillary's praises. She was a high school friend of Hillary's.

Then, there was the main event, Hillary Clinton's victory speech. I took some shots of the ballroom before the event started, and at the risk of overstating, they conveyed to me both a calm and a tense anticipation.















It seemed like hours that those poor kids stood up on those risers, waiting for Hillary to speak. I made a comment to that effect to a college professor who stood next to me, just outside my cage. "Do they look tired to you?" he said. Point taken.





At one point, some of Hillary's supporters shouted in unison to Candy Crowley several times, until they got her attention. She had a miles-wide smile as she did an impromptu Eva Peron impression, and the crowd went wild.

When Hillary came out, the crowd fairly exploded with excitement, and although I've seen louder crowds, never had I experienced anything approaching the adoration her supporters expressed. The difference was difficult to define, something about the way the cheers seemed to be pushed right out of them by their hearts, about to burst.

After the speech was over, the revelers gone, and the stories had all been filed, there were a few of us left, wandering the floor or just winding down. I walked around the ballroom, pausing to take it all in. Sometimes, you can get a fuller picture of something by observing a place after it's gone.

I slipped a little on the thick mat of confetti, reached down to grab a handful. Historic litter. I walked up behind the podium, looked out across the nearly empty ballroom.

Only a few stragglers remained. Lannie Davis was up on the 2nd level, talking to a camera that led straight to Larry King, and a BBC America reporter was shooting inserts, it appeared.

Standing in Hillary's footsteps, I surveyed the ballroom from her vantage point, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to face that, to face history. It takes a special kind of person to want to do that. The kind of person who won't give up, no matter what. I looked at the floor, strewn with confetti and "Hillary" signs, and I could hear the faint echo of the adoring throng that has erupted so joyously a few hours earlier. "More power to ya," I thought.