Scene on the Road

...to a new blog publishing platform. All the old posts and comments will remain archived on this site, but from February 5, 2009 on, the new posts can be found here.

See you there. TomG

One of the things I've always enjoyed about making pictures is how it's not really about what kind of camera you use or how many megapixels it has. What I like is the challenge that even after most of the technical aspects of making pictures become second nature, and even when you learn how to really "see" when you make a picture - the most important thing in photography is what's going on inside your head.

Conversely, one of the most frustrating aspects about taking pictures is when you forget all the photographic lessons you've learned. I made that mistake twice (that I know about) in just this past week alone.

On Tuesday, I joined community outreach workers with Volunteers of America conducting a national homeless census as they headed to a tent camp in the woods inside the highway interchange east of downtown Camden. We arrived as the snow was turning to sleet, just after dawn when everything was still dark, and everyone in the camp was inside their tents still asleep. I took just a few photos as the workers began approaching each tent, and then started figuring out a good angle for photos. I introduced myself to the first two people who climbed out of their tent, and I followed them as they were escorted from the woods to the van, parked out on the exit ramp. They were given a sandwich, and in a matter of minutes, the other workers were coming out of the woods with a half dozen other homeless men, including John Palumbo, below.

Because I figured the census would be taking place right there in the woods, I hadn't made many photos of the tent camp. My thought was I'd wait until everyone was awake, outside and being interviewed. I even thought the residents might be clearing snow off the tents, putting on their coats, maybe even brushing their teeth.

I didn't know everything would be moving immediately out to the van, and that after they were done, the workers (along with me and Inquirer reporter Matt Katz) would be taking off for the next stop. We didn't go back into the woods, so my anticipated "better" photo of life in the tents was never shot.

The lesson I learned but forgotten this day? Take pictures when you see them. Don't hold off shooting because you're waiting for something better to come along, but often never does.

I also made the mistake of not finding out exactly how the people in control of the situation would be working.

A lot of the pictures I make on assignments are the result of my anticipation - knowing how people might act in certain situations - and my reacting quickly as a photojournalist. That comes from experience, which can sometimes lead to a case of having just enough knowledge to get yourself in trouble. It never hurts to ask.

Unfortunately, I forgot THAT lesson just the following day.

On Thursday, I was in the office when we heard NJ State Police had found an underground bunker with a cache of semi-automatic rifles in rural Gloucester County. I didn't know until I arrived an hour later this had occurred three days earlier. The police discovered the stockpile that included everything from World War II-era firearms to rifles and modern handguns, a live grenade, gunpowder, and a canister of tear gas while investigating a Salem County burglary.

The 259 guns and nearly a half-million rounds of ammunition had already been seized and removed by the time the news got out. The Police Mobile Command Post and the television trucks were just pulling out as I drove up. With lots of experience arriving at stale news scenes, I tried to add some sense of drama to a straightforward picture of the owner's house by framing the scene with the remaining police vehicles.

Then I noticed officers working in the back end of the property and asked one of the officers about it. "We couldn't move the black powder, so they've got to dispose of it on site," he said. My mistake: not asking how that would be accomplished.

After photographing with my 300mm lens as the bomb squad "disposed" of the powder, Inquirer reporter Allison Steele walked up right behind me. At the very moment I turned around to talk with her, I heard a "pop" and saw her reacting with surprise. I spun back to see a giant fireball and a huge puff of smoke rising. I grabbed my camera, still with the long lens, and was able to make just one frame of what was left of the fireball...

...and then one of the officers stepped back into the scene, but by then, the smoke had mostly cleared.

It could have been a great photo...if only I had been ready for it...if only I had asked the police officer exactly what "dispose of" meant...if only I was standing in the right place, and...if only I had my second camera body with the wide angle lens in my hands when it ignited.

That's part of being a photographer. You get a lot of photos that are "if only..."

After almost a year now, credit for the photo source of the very first Shepard Fairey Obama poster (above, left) can be given properly to photographer Mannie Garcia. He joins previously credited photographers David C. Turney (center) and Brooks Kraft (right), who provided the basis for two of Fairey's works later in the election year.

Since my last post two days ago ended with my falling asleep, I wanted to update a few things, and maybe call this my last full post on the Obama Poster Photo Source topic. As I said to a few commenters on Wednesday, then I can go back to blogging about shooting newspaper weather feature photos and living vicariously through the adventures of my bigger-city photojournalism colleagues.

Mannie did call me back that morning, and when we first talked he was in the White House already covering President Obama's very first day on the job. He is still freelancing in Washington, DC, currently covering the White House and Capital Hill for Bloomberg News. He told me when he saw my email telling him he was the photographer, "At first I was kind of confused. Then it hit me, and I thought wow. That's why it always seemed so familiar."

Of the iconic poster he said, "I've been on the campaign for twenty something months, so I would see the artwork, I would photograph it, and think what is with this image? But it didn't snap. It never occurred to me it was my picture. I thought, 'that's familiar.' I would see it and say that's cool, but it did keep sticking in my head." He was quick to add he is not mad at Fairey, and he's not looking at any lawsuits. "I know artists like to look at things; they see things and they make stuff. It's a really cool piece of work. I wouldn't mind getting a signed litho or something from the artist to put up on my wall."

I talked with him again this morning, and he is still proud his photo is the basis of the painting that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC - the first portrait of the new president to enter the national collection.

Speaking of hanging on walls, The Danziger Projects Gallery is working with the AP to include Mannie's photo in their "CAN & DID - Graphics, Art, and Photography from the Obama Campaign" exhibit that just opened on inauguration day in New York - and in a limited edition of custom archival prints by master printmaker David Adamson.

The gallery's James Danziger, through his The Year in Pictures blog was also responsible for bringing the whole mystery to a wider audience than I could ever possibly reach with my blog. This "HOPEfully Last Post on the Topic" is also opportunity to put all the credit - and links - in one place, and recognize some of the many web-sleuths out there, like him, who didn't give up on finding the photo.

As near as I can tell, there could have been talk about the source photo on a forum on Expresso Beans that started with a thread almost exactly one year ago - Jan 25, 2008 - beginning with an image of the Obama "Progress" poster and a statement attributed to Shepard Fairey in support of candidate Barack Obama promising that "proceeds from this print go to produce prints for a large statewide poster campaign." That forum - for admirers, collectors and sellers of Fairey's Obama artwork - was offered up as a clue in more than one email or comment I received. I initially looked there, but with almost 4,000 posts on over 200 pages of discussion about how many different ways the artist signed the "F" on his autographed posters and whether they are printed on cream or white stock, I gave up. I did learn on the site that signed and numbered screen prints of the original "Progress" run of 350 have sold for as much as $5500. on ebay, with the latest sale listed - on Jan. 21st - for $3152.

I don't know if anyone else ever looked there, but it was Mike Cramer, a computer programmer here in Philadelphia, who was the first to point to the Reuters photo by Jim Young. He found it, as Fairey said he had, by doing a Google images search.

The photo was illustrating a time.com story which as it turned out, was mis-credited to Jonathan Daniel with Getty Images. James Danziger, also alerted by Cramer's comment, cleared all that up by talking to Daniel and then Time picture editor Mark Rykoff. Meanwhile, by the time I read my email a few hours later and talked with Cramer, Rykoff had already fixed the Reuters credit on his website. All I had to do was start trying to contact Young, who coincidentally had just posted a piece on the Reuters blog about shooting black and white film with his $25 plastic Holga camera. I left a comment there, and later that night ended up talking with him and his boss Gary Hershorn, Reuters Pictures Editor for North America. Jim shot the photo in January of 2007 during testimony in the Senate confirmation hearings for Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

It took just a few days for links to alternative photos to start showing up as comments on the blogs of everyone involved in the search. Graphic artists wrote that everyone was giving too much credit to Fairey's use of Photoshop image manipulation tools. We photo people just assumed the artist did some work on it, including adding the rest of the necktie and shoulders. That's why we were so willing to accept the Reuters photo as the source. Portrait artists offered that they would never flip a person's face.

One of the very first sites to be linked to with the new photo was an October 2006 blog post on the Intrepid Liberal Journal by information professional Robert Ellman. He used the photo to illustrate a hypothetical Obama inauguration speech. Ironically, the sleuths began hitting on his page just hours before Obama would be making his actual address.

There were also links passed around to the picture at photobucket.com, starmedia.com and with a 2006 CBSnews.com story. The photo was also found by many sleuths paired up with one of Senator John McCain on a political website from just a few months ago in the general election.

Throughout Inauguration Day, bloggers were copying the Obama headshot into Photoshop to determine how close it really was. By this time most were certain the photo - which appeared to have been taken by the Associated Press sometime in 2006 - was the one.

Steve Simula compared it (above) to the Reuters photo on his Flickr page. Digital photography instructor Nathan Lunstrum also created a composite and posted it as more evidence on his blog, Amble On. Like Nathan and a few others, Chris Perley (below) rotated it just slightly, layered it over the HOPE poster, and then changed the opacity so you can see both together.

With the actual image now nailed down, all that remained then was determining the true source of the photo and the identity of the photographer. As I drove back from covering the inauguration in Washington that night I fully expected someone would have found the answer by the time I woke in the morning.

But, I couldn't get to sleep, so inspired by all the sleuthing by others, I decided to do some detective work of my own. It didn't take long, especially with all the clues others had already dug up. I kept searching for different versions of the photo, downloading them, and opening the embedded caption files and metadata. As most of the images on the web are there as a result of cutting and pasting, right-clicking and saving from other sites, almost every picture I opened had been stripped of all that information...

...until I got to a photo on pennlive.com with a Pennsylvania Primary story.

That photo had a full caption, complete with Mannie Garcia's name.

It is entirely possible there are others who found Mannie's name first but didn't get any recognition. Others may have posted comments on a blog somewhere and could still be waiting for them to be approved. But the entire discovery process was really a collaborative effort between everyone who cared about such things. Someday, new or existing software will be perfected to better search images on the web. But until then, photos like this will only be found through luck or perseverance. Like former Time magazine photojournalist Dirck Halstead looking for days through his slides to find a photograph of President Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky in a crowd of people that was shot well before the scandal broke.

Also, in response to other bloggers and angry emails that I'm trying to somehow diminish Fairey's work ("...are you saying Grant Wood isn't an artist because he used his sister and a dentist as a basis for American Gothic?") or do an "expose" or "force a copyright case," my own quest for the source image stemmed only from my curiosity as a photographer and a journalist.

The poster is beautiful and will no doubt someday end up in art books along with "American Gothic." When I first saw it in West Philadelphia last winter during the Pennsylvania Primary, I was so impressed by its social movement propaganda hip street art look, I walked over to get a closer look. It was too sophisticated to be from the local Obama office, or for that matter, even from his national campaign. So I was intrigued.

I always figured the source photo was made by a White House photographer - someone who has shot thousands of headshots of familiar political faces. Otherwise, I guessed a photographer shooting Obama up close just one time in their life would have shown the pictures to all their friends, and have memorized every single detail of their photos.

Anyway, now we just need to hear what Shepard Fairey thinks. He was on NPR's Fresh Air on inauguration day, before Mannie Garcia was identified - but well after the Reuters photo was found. You can listen to the whole interview here (Fast forward to the 13 minute mark to hear just the photo part).

Host Terry Gross asks him, "I'm wondering if you'd like to give a shout out to the photographer whose image that came from?"

Fairey replies: "You know, I actually don't know who the photographer is...but, whoever you are, thank you..."

The photographer is MANNIE GARCIA, a Washington DC freelancer for the Associated Press. (UPDATE: Click here for more.)

Driving home from Washington after the inauguration, cruising on adrenalin from covering the historic event and then stopping two or three times for coffee, and even posting - from a rest area on I-95 - for a fourth time about this "Obama Poster Photo Source MYSTERY" and making late night cell phone calls (is it against the law while driving in Maryland?) to the Associated Press bureaus in New York and Washington and talking to editors who said they hadn't seen anything about a photo being credited as the source of the Obama poster, but promised to leave a note for the day shift, I got home and couldn't go to sleep. Whew.

So I figured I'd see how hard it could be to find the photographer a bunch of us have been looking for for a while now.

It wasn't that difficult - especially since I had at least five or six clues from others - mostly in the form of emails I received, and comments on my recent blog post and on James Danziger's The Year in Pictures.

Searching Google Images with terms - Obama 2006 - I hit a photo-illustration on only the fourth page.

That image, which used the Obama photo was found on the Extreme Mortman political blog, which took me to the original site for the Examiner.com's Yeas and Nays column:

Then, inspired by Mike Cramer of Philadelphia who located the Reuters news photo last week we all believed was the source photograph - he found it on the 20th page of his search - I kept going up into the forties. No luck.

Bored with that, I remembered the photo on the CBS site that a number of sleuths told me about had an AP credit, so I added "associated press" to my search terms. And there it was - on page nine:

And amazingly enough, just like with Mike's initial find, this one had a Pennsylvania connection. The image was a file photo, on the pennlive.com website, with a March 2008 Harrisburg Patriot News story about the Pennsylvania Primary.

I right-clicked on the Obama headshot, and to my surprise, downloaded a FULLSIZE, as in 24.7 Megabytes, version of the original AP file. Then, holding my breath, I opened the IPTC caption file and there it was:

The photo was made by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia who was on assignment for the AP in April of 2006, where a National Press Club news advisory alerted the media that, "Academy Award Winner George Clooney will address National Press Club on his recent visit to war-torn Darfur and will release video footage from his trip to Sudan. Clooney will be joined by U.S. Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), co-sponsors of S. 1462, The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, and co-sponsors of amendments to increase funding
for peacekeeping operations in Sudan."

So, it looks like the image that poster artist Shepard Fairey said looked presidential, telling the Washington Post: "He is gazing off into the future, saying, 'I can guide you,' " actually showed our new president listening to George Clooney. Or, probably more likely, fellow Senator Brownback.

Here's a CBS videotape of the Press Conference.

When I wake up this morning, I'll be calling the AP in Washington and seeing if Mannie replied to my email.

(UPDATE: The source photographer is MANNIE GARCIA, a Washington D.C. based freelancer on assignment for the Associated Press in 2006. Click here for more.)

Ironically, just hours before President Obama was sworn in, there was a flurry of activity on the Obama-poster-photo-source front. I received a number of emails and comments on my MYSTERY SOLVED! post.

There is a brand NEW photo a couple of photo detectives found that looks better than the Reuters photo. It has the entire necktie and shoulders, it's facing the same way, and has all the same highlights and shadows - even on Obama's collar - as the iconic Fairey poster.

Steve Simula created the evidence above for his Flickr page using the Obama headshot he and a few others out there found (just as Fairey did originally) by doing their own Google image-searching. It looks to be an Associated Press photo made sometime in 2006 or even earlier.

I am at a rest stop on I-95 driving home from covering the Obama inauguration, so I can't look into it now, but I have every confidence someone out there will find a version of the photo that still has all of its metadata and caption info intact. Let us know!