How do photographers deal with elections? What is the role of the visual in election politics?

In this episode, Brian O’Neill interviews three photographers and scholars of visual arts and media to help contextualize the visual culture surrounding elections. Photographer and sociologist Tim Hale revisits the podcast and discusses two books little talked about together. The first is Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations, and the second is William Eggleston’s Election Eve. Tim, a one-time newspaper photojournalist, provides insights into his history of image-making around elections. Then, he sets that as the context for beginning to understand Winogrand’s concept of Public Relations. This book corresponds to what sociologist Erving Goffman called the interaction ritual at the “front stage” v. the “back stage” of social life. As Brian and Tim work through the book, they share stories from their experiences photographing the “spectacle” of the so-called “target-rich” environments that engender rallies and other political events.

Brian and Tim then pivot to discussing Election Eve, a lesser-known and discussed project of lauded photographer William Eggleston. A book that emerged as a self-published artist book in an edition of 5 in the 1970s was re-released in 2017 and chronicles Eggleston’s journey across the South leading up to the election of Jimmy Carter. What was Eggleston looking for? What did he find? Tim and Brian discuss this elusive work, which they argue is interesting because of the way it speaks to a historical moment in a way that is rare for Eggleston, who, as it is widely known, seldom edited his own sequences of images or worked on what might be called documentary projects. Contrastingly, Election Eve makes one wonder what America Jimmy Carter had in mind, for he too was a man of the South, a place where the land itself was troubled, with histories of colonialism, racism, and slavery. Furthermore, and unlike Winogrand’s Public Relations, Election Eve presents an overall troubling ambiance, in which one can speculate about the societal impact of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Oil Crisis.

Links:

Tim Hale: https://www.timhale.net/about-the-photos

The Grift: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/grift

Election Eve: https://steidl.de/Books/Election-Eve-0812354652.html

Public Relations: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2372

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf

The Photobook Journal: https://photobookjournal.com

Music provided by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

Brian O’Neill: https://www.brianfoneill.net

Immaterial Books: https://www.immaterialbooks.com