Scene on the Road

Happy New Year.

Here's a really quick video of ALL 366 Daily Photos I posted on this blog this year. All the photos are here, and a gallery of selects here.

The violinist is my daughter Madeline.
The piece is Bach's Unaccompanied Sonata No. 1 in G minor: 4. Presto

Post-New Years Day, Second Street, South Philadelphia

It's official. Photojournalist and college professor, Pete Souza who served as the official photographer during President Ronald Reagan's second term and covered Barack Obama’s first year in the U.S. Senate for the Chicago Tribune, has been named Obama’s Chief White House Photographer.

The National Press Photographer's Association website broke the news this morning, ending the speculation in photo circles that comes up every time we get a new president. Souza took the job on Sunday after discussions with Obama's transition staff.

The president-elect's staff distributed behind-the-scenes photos from his historic Election Night on flickr, and with all the emphasis on the immediacy of Web some photographers worried what images future generations might see. (The Presidential Transition Project just posted three Callie Shell photos of the Obama daughters getting ready for school today on flickr.

Pete says he took the job after he was assured, "The primary function of the photo office will be to visually document the presidency for history," and added, "I believe I've established a good working relationship with the President-elect, and believe that he trusts me enough to give me the necessary access."

In the introduction to his best-selling book "The Rise of Barack Obama," Pete wrote, “Early into that first year, I began to believe that I was photographing a future president of the United States, and that my pictures might become an historic look at the rise of Sen. Obama’s political career. That may sound like an easy statement to make now, but that’s really how I felt at the time.”

He shot the photo above for the Tribune, as Michelle Obama brushed off her husband's coat inside the Old State Capitol just before he went outside to announce his candidacy for President of the United States in Springfield, Ill. on Feb. 10, 2007.

The book also says Pete, who was based in Washington, DC as the national photographer for the Chicago Tribune and even worked years earlier for the Chicago Sun Times, hadn't met Obama until he came to Washington as the junior senator from Illinois. It sounded to me like one of those biographical details made up by a publicist, but Pete says, "yes, met him for the first time on the morning that he was to be sworn in."

Above is Pete's photo of Obama during a staff meeting in his temporary Senate office, made exactly four years ago to the day today, on January 5, 2005, the day after he took the oath of office.

In an interview just before the November election, Souza told Photo District News' Holly Stuart Hughes he was "concerned both candidates [McCain & Obama] now have photographers and their main mission is to provide a public relations service. It's fine if the White House press office wants to use photographs taken by the White House photographer for their own purposes, as long as the photographer is documenting for history. If those pictures don't get seen for 20 years, so be it. The president doesn't have to be friends with the photographer, but they certainly have to trust and know him or her well enough to give that person essentially unfettered access to the oval office."

In another PDN interview, before Pete's appointment, current White House photographer Eric Draper advised his successor to prepare for the “ride of their life.”

I mentioned in yesterday's post that the Presidential Transition Team released photographs of the president-elect and his wife in their hotel room before sending their daughters off to their new school. The pictures, on the Obama-Biden change.gov website and flickr, were shot by Time Magazine photographer Callie Shell.

I just got a call from a reader who said she heard Shell on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday. You can hear the clip here.

This is one of the three pictures:

I'm going on my second week of not posting a "Daily Photo" here. Having to come up with an image worth posting each of the 366 days last year may not sound like a big deal, but it really did consume a lot of photographic and mental energy. I'm not complaining, mind you. It honestly wasn't so tough on the days I had photos from assignments that I knew the newspaper wouldn't be interested in. But sometimes, on days off, when I was sick, or working all day in the yard...That really hit me as I wandered around the Mummers Parade last week with my son and realized that I didn't have to do anything with the photos I shot. So I had him snap me with the most non-Mummer non-New Year's Day thing we encountered - a Leprechaun.

Even so, I'm missing it already. Working the early morning news / philly.com shift this week, I waited for the sun to come up so I could photograph the scene at the Kearny school where President Bush was to visit later in the day. After shooting and sending my photos, and starting to drive back to the office, I was looking at the beautiful sunrise thinking I'd be shooting it, if I still had a Daily Photo. So what, I told myself, I can still shoot it "just because."

When I walked into the newsroom, editors were just talking about how the presidential motorcade would be closing down the bridges during rush hour. "Hey," I shouted, "you want a really pretty picture of the Ben Franklin Bridge? I just made one fifteen minutes ago."

They did. A different frame got used on the From the Source breaking news blog.

That doesn't happen often. One of the reasons I started the Daily Photo a year ago was to give me a good reason to keep picking up my camera. Throughout the year, what I tended to do was shoot pictures all day long. When on assignment, I would often see something visually intriguing and then try to compose a photo in the most interesting way I could, even if I didn't think it would work for the newspaper. Sometimes, I would even forget about my blogging "obligation" to produce a daily photo, but later in the evening at home, after dinner and any other household activities were done, I would look through the assignment "rejects," and anything else I'd shot that day and post one.

Here are a handful of those "leftovers" I found while clearing out my files from the past year. These never made it into either the newspaper or onto the blog, usually because something better came up....

(I'm not "guilty" in this first one...I was at a meter sending photos from my laptop, when the cop double parked - South Philly style - right behind me)

Ocean City, NJ

Media Courthouse

Westmont, NJ

North Philadelphia

Society Hill

Reading Terminal Market

Collingswood, NJ

JFK Boulevard above 22nd Street

Photography with mirrors can go two ways. A photographer either uses them as a device to shoot a self portrait (see the rail at right) or they work really hard to not show up in them.

So I was intrigued by Inquirer senior photographer Clem Murray's portrait in today's newspaper with the story of Drexel University mathematician and mirror designer Andrew Hicks.

There are at least eight or nine mirrors - plus even more reflections of mirrors in those mirrors - but no reflections of the photographer. You can see Hicks was looking right into Clem's lens, but where is he I wondered. Was it a trick, done - with mirrors - in collusion with his expert subject?

Nope.

I asked Clem about it and (this is why I really like his picture) he did something I would never have thought of.

I know other photographers outside of journalism might Photoshop themselves out of the image, or rig up a giant black cloth backdrop like those photographers who shoot department store display windows.

What Clem did was put his camera on a tripod, set up his strobe and softbox, connected to the camera via a sync cord, composed his picture, and then simply walked away from the reflection. He put his camera on self-timer.

Simple, but it worked.

Even as a six column photo, across the whole front of the Health & Science section of the newspaper, I looked close and didn't figure it out. You can see Clem's camera in the big mirror, just behind the professor's left shoulder, looking like just some other part of his lab. Very cool. Also cool is Hick's non-reversing mirror, the one in the center of the photo with the readable newspaper print.

(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.)

When I came across the "Save the Date" opening notice on James Danziger's blog for his show - "Can & Did - Graphics, Art, and Photography from the Obama Campaign" - I was immediately ecstatic.

I thought I'd finally found the answer to a question that has haunted me for months now: Who shot the photo the artist used to create the now-iconic Obama HOPE poster?

There, among all the graphics, photos, and paintings on the press release was a David Turnley photo of a smiling Barack Omaba, and right next to it - the exact same image on the Shepard Fairey poster!

Well, almost.

It was only after I started another unproductive Google session did it hit me that this wasn't the original poster, but the one created for Election Day. It was the fund-raising "VOTE" version.

But, now I was even more curious. I blogged last month on my puzzlement over why no photographer has ever came forward to claim credit for taking the picture that became the ubiquitous poster. I’ve fixated on it ever since, so I started asking around again.

David Turnley told me he did give one of his images to the Obama campaign and granted Fairey the right to work from his photo for the "VOTE" poster, but didn’t think the original poster source was one of his pictures.

I e-mailed James Danziger figuring he might know, but he said he too, was “mystified.” I also e-mailed the Fairey people, but they never got back to me - either this time or when I originally asked back when he did the Time magazine cover.

Danziger said he would be pursuing the question as well on his blog, which is well read in both the journalism and art photography worlds. So maybe we’ll get an answer before the inauguration.

One can always Hope.

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

"I think I found it: It's from Time Magazine, February 2007. I've put them together to be sure. http://www.webkist.com/ " (Mike Cramer)

That's the comment I got on my blog this afternoon. Mike Cramer, a computer programmer who does work for PBS and others from his home just a few blocks away from the Inquirer Building right here in Philadelphia solved the mystery of who is the photographer whose photo of Barack Obama was used by artist Shepard Fairey as the basis for his iconic PROGRESS / HOPE / CHANGE posters.

The picture was made by Reuters photographer Jim Young.

Mike found it the same way the artist did: a Google images search. He told me, "I was avoiding doing work...just figured 'obama 2007' would be a reasonable search term...My wife laughed when I told her it appeared on page 20-something. I think she would have given up by then."

So he copied and then played with the photo, "stretching it a bit - really, a tiny amount - and flipped it horizontally, but didn't need to rotate it at all." He then posted the effort on his Flickr page and his website and left me a note. That's his evidence at the top.

After hearing from Mike, I also copied and played with Jim's photo. I used the "flip canvas horizontal" rotate image command in Photoshop, and made a quick mask using the "photocopy" sketch filter. And just like Mike, after only a minimum of effort in layers, I also confirmed that while the ears weren't quite right, everything else about the two images lined up pretty darn close. This is my quick effort.

Mike's wife is an illustrator, and he's seen her working, so he figured, "Fairey...he surely tweaked it plenty. And even so, the eyes & mouth & nose line up too well for it to be a coincidence."

Fairey has told interviewers he went on the internet and found a photo of Obama, then did "my thing to it."

I was almost convinced I finally knew whose photo that was, but to be 100 percent sure, I just needed to talk to Jim Young.

He is based in the Reuters bureau in Washington, DC, and forwarded my email to his boss, Gary Hershorn, Pictures Editor for North America, in New York. Gary said "we must have all seen that poster hundreds of times and never put it together." But after seeing Mike's work, and flipping the photo tonight himself, he decided: "Looks like a perfect match to me. It's great that the photographer who shot the original photo will get the credit. That's just great."

Then he looked it up for me. The photo was taken by Young in Washington on January 30, 2007. The caption reads: "Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) listens to testimony during the confirmation hearings for Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte on Capitol Hill."

Young later told me he remembers shooting two other assignments that day, and sent three different head shots of Obama. But didn't think they were anything special. Even though "he hadn't announced yet," Young recalled, "there was of course anticipation he might run for president."

That was two years ago. In the meantime, Jim has probably shot thousands of pictures of Obama, saying, "It was a great story, very historic." He traveled with the candidate for most of the year, and photographed all the key events: The win in Iowa, a loss in New Hampshire, the European trip, Joe Biden's selection as running mate, the Denver convention, and election night in Chicago's Grant Park. "I saw that poster all over the place, all year. For a lot of people it symbolized the campaign. It meant so much to so many people." Jim says the news that it's his photo "totally came out of the blue." Never in all that time, he says, did it even occur to Jim that it was his picture that the artist started with. "I'm flattered it's a real honor. A great honor that an image of mine was used this way."

The photographers working on the campaign all got used to seeing their photos at rallies - printed on t-shirts, attached to signs. "Its been talked about, how often other photographers images have been reproduced," he says of the ease with which pictures can be downloaded from the web. He and the other photographers also made dozens of photos of the Obama HOPE poster. "I don't think any of us thought for an instant that it might be one of our photos. I just assumed it was from the campaign."

Jim made these photos - of HIS poster - just a few weeks before the election, as Obama made a surprise stop at campaign headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri before a big downtown rally. He even shot a version of the poster "flipped" as he photographed Obama supporters on the outside looking in through a window. "It could have been anybody's picture. I can't believe it's mine.

"I'm honored, but I'm glad it didn't come out until after the campaign," Jim said. "I think even if I had known it was mine, I would have kept quiet. It would be just my little secret..."

(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!

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.

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..."