The Image Makers section examines how a photo influences our view of reality. This week: a photographer who captures her colleagues and thus reveals how tightly orchestrated many press moments are.
The photo of Donald Trump half hidden behind a car, taken between two tree trunks, is the result of hours of waiting. The image was taken on October 2, last Monday, at 7:30 in the evening. At that moment, the former president is walking out of the Supreme Court in New York, after a civil fraud case was started against him there in the morning (again). He is accused of lying about the value of his assets.
Freelance photographer Brittainy Newman has already spent about ten hours on it. At least that’s what I gather from the photos on The Associated Press (AP) website. The first of hers was made at 10 to 8 in the morning; the last, from Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba, just after 9:30 p.m.
That means that Newman stayed another four hours after that photo of Trump among the trees. And you bet she was there well before 8 o’clock in the morning. Bring sandwiches, water and extra camera food. Search for the best spot at the foot of those iconic stone steps and the thick columns in the background, the backdrop to countless news photos about American lawsuits. And wait.
What do you do as a photographer? Point your camera at all those other waiting journalists, television makers and photographers around you, of course. Newman’s first two photos from last Monday are of the press circus that has settled at the foot of the Supreme Court. A forest of cables, tripods, cameras, lamps and reflection screens have been set up. Technicians and presenters move between them as acrobats and balancing artists.
The photographer then focuses on anti-Trump demonstrators walking by and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who makes a statement on the steps. Then, at 12:30 am, Newman takes the photo above: another chaotic press image, without focus, without main theme, just – flats. What she sees is what we get.
That is downright wonderful. Photographers who capture their own kind during these kinds of press moments are like actors who suddenly start talking to the audience during their performance. They lift a glimpse of the veil and show that we are all watching tightly directed theater, which is reality for a few hours.
In the background of all those beautifully framed and balanced news photos, of serious lawyers in that stately setting, these messy scenes take place. That is the media machine that provides us with information. If all goes well, she does so as objectively and unbiased as possible. She is, as it turns out, bound by the rules of a system that is otherwise invisible to the viewer: behind the crush barriers, within certain zones, so that almost everyone has the same view and shoots the same images.
You can also see these images in Brittainy Newman’s offer at AP. She too, like her colleagues, photographed the demonstrators on the streets and the lawyers and prosecutors on the stairs and finally, at the end of that long day, the accused himself. He had clearly come to the conclusion that he would not benefit much from an extensive press shower that day and opted for a silent retreat.
That’s what Newman had been waiting for all those hours. There was the news. But actually, the moments when she focused on what was happening behind the scenes, the photos that you could call the by-catch of the day, are infinitely more interesting. I think she realized that herself when she included three of those images in her offer.