Imagine millions of Americans doing the same thing all over the country - simultaneously. Something more common in most homes than eating dinner. Should be an easy scene to photograph, right? But as I set out on assignment to do just that last week, all I could think about was what a tough job it always is. I'm talking about photographing people watching television.
Over 40 million people saw Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for president on television last week. Inquirer photographer Bonnie Weller photographed the crowd on Independence Mall watching the big screen in front of the Constitution Center. I was in the living room of Stephen and Leslie Pierce, and two of their three children, as they watched this historic event.
Over the years I have included television screens in the background of dozens of my photographs - it really is a ubiquitous part of most scenes of daily life. But every time something significant is broadcast, and every time I've been dispatched to show people watching it unfold on their televisions, I've faced the same dilemma - how to show both people and what's happening on the screen in the same photograph? Like most living rooms, the Pierce's had a television against one wall - and seats backed up against another. Unless you rearrange furniture, or make people watch from two feet away from the screen (neither one an option for an honest photojournalist) it's not gonna happen. So as photographers we have to rely on optical and compositional effects.
The picture I liked best from the evening was one of Obama's reflection on the glass of a framed portrait of the kids hanging on the wall. "It's like he's part of our family," daughter Shelli (now 25 yrs old) said when I showed her the image on the LCD screen on the back of my camera.
As I young photographer I spent a week once, visiting all the camera counters at the K-Mart and local drug stores looking for the proper color correction filter I'd read somewhere I needed, so I could shoot pictures of the tv screen using daylight balanced Kodachrome. When my dad later drove me to the bigger city and a real camera store, a worker there told me to just adjust the color and tint - make it more red, he said, to compensate for the blue-green of the screen. Thankfully he didn't try to sell me a new camera - one with a leaf shutter instead of the focal-plane on my SLR - to minimize the dark band you get because of the time it takes the 525 horizontal scan lines to complete the image on the screen. I had read about using a tripod and shooting at 1/8th second to minimize the banding, but still spent a few weeks perfecting my technique, shooting a roll of film, shipping it off to Kodak for processing, then checking out and adjusting my results when the slides came back, before shooting another roll. I don't know what I ever did with the pictures, but I do think about it every-time I photograph a television screen.
Speaking of presidential candidates, this is John McCain, just before he withdrew from the campaign race eight years ago.
McCain was "unable" to make it to the Super Tuesday primary debate with George W. Bush, so he appeared on the podium, on a television monitor, in Los Angeles from 1500 miles away in St. Louis. (Republican candidate Alan Keyes was also there in person).
This "one station only" model was in my hotel room in Idaho while I retraced the journey of Lewis and Clark a few years ago.
On the one-year anniversary of 9-11, I wandered Center City's high office towers looking for images. This was at the entrance/waiting area of a parking garage.
When President Bill Clinton's Grand Jury tape was broadcast live in 1998, I was sent to photograph people watching in barber shops and Laundromats. Then I was prompted by the onsceen warning - "Viewers are cautioned that this broadcast contains strong language and sexual content" - to make another stop at an adult content bookstore to see what they were watching.
