Editor’s Corner
January 23, 2009
Making history
By
Constance Hale and Andrea Pitzer
The symbolism inherent in this week’s Presidential Inauguration demanded narratives, but the stories that emerged in its immediate aftermath often felt either like a list of events or overly ponderous and self-conscious. As the headline of Alessandra Stanley’s “The TV Watch” noted in The New York Times, it was “A Day Best Captured by Image, Not Narrative.” AP and Getty Images coaxed some classic pictures from the spectacle. On the video front, the editing of The Washington Post’s “In the Moment,” particularly the “Celebrations” footage, combined beautiful shots with a sense of the unfolding story.
Washington City Paper photographer Darrow Montgomery caught the feel of the crowds, streets, and Inaugural Balls with his “DC’s Biggest Party in Pictures.” And a great conceptual theme unites the images from Las Vegas by CNN’s Mathieu Young in “Looking Up.”
In a wildly different graphic approach, we enjoyed a data map of Twitter inauguration feeds that becomes its own visual narrative as the clock runs. Then, of course, there are the blogs, most of which covered the Inauguration more as news than narrative. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. looked back to Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to create an arc of understanding about Obama’s speech.
And in an example of how a comic angle can actually underscore powerful moments, The Daily Show’s John Oliver parodies the traditional “historic event” narrative in his Inauguration Day experience from the National Mall, with a few expletives included.
We found excellent writing about Obama in the November issue of The New Yorker and the January/February issue of The Atlantic, both of which were dedicated entirely to the new president or the coming administration. Wil Haygood of The Washington Post extended his earlier narrative about an African-American White House butler and his wife—this time following the same man through Tuesday’s festivities.
We suspect that similarly touching narratives will emerge in the coming weeks. Please send us any stories you see that capture a small sliver, a hefty slice, or the entire sweep of the day.