{"id":37482,"date":"2014-09-25T01:11:53","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T01:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37482"},"modified":"2014-09-25T01:11:53","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T01:11:53","slug":"meditation-on-president-obamas-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37482","title":{"rendered":"Meditation on President Obama\u2019s Portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meditation on President Obama\u2019s Portrait<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Lens Blog: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-07-25<\/p>\n

Maurice Berger<\/a>,<\/strong> Research Professor and Chief Curator
\nCenter for Art, Design and Visual Culture
\nUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County<\/em><\/p>\n

Dawoud Bey\u2019s<\/a> photograph of the man who would soon be president<\/a> was taken on a Sunday afternoon in early 2007, at Barack<\/a> and Michelle Obama\u2019s<\/a> Hyde Park<\/a> home in Chicago<\/a>. The portrait is at once stately and informal. Mr. Obama\u2019s hands are folded gracefully in his lap. He wears an elegant suit and white shirt, but no tie. He stares intensely into the camera.<\/p>\n

The Museum of Contemporary Photography<\/a> had commissioned Mr. Bey the year before to take a portrait of a notable Chicagoan. He had known the Obamas for several years and saw them periodically at social gatherings. Impressed with Mr. Obama\u2019s keynote speech<\/a> at the 2004 Democratic convention, Mr. Bey sensed a \u201cgrowing air of expectancy\u201d about him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was asked who I wanted to photograph,\u201d Mr. Bey said, \u201cit took me but a second to decide that I wanted to photograph him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bey posed Mr. Obama at the head of the dining room table, light reflecting off its polished surface, and photographed him from an angle. \u201cI wanted an interesting animation of the body, and finally through camera positioning and having him turn himself slightly I figured it out,\u201d Mr. Bey said…<\/p>\n

…Mr. Obama\u2019s race has rendered him particularly vulnerable to this kind of mythmaking. Right-wing extremists see him as an exemplar of what is wrong with America. He has become a symbol of a dark and foreign otherness, a threat to white supremacy and racial purity. To some, he is a Muslim conspirator, bent on dismantling American mores and traditions. To others, he is an angry black man covertly intent on avenging slavery and other historic injustices.<\/p>\n

This mythmaking has not been limited to conservatives. A year after Mr. Bey photographed Mr. Obama, the candidate was rousing messianic fantasies on the left, stoked by the election\u2019s most memorable image: Shepard Fairey\u2019s<\/a> \u201cHope\u201d poster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Distributed independently by the artist and later adopted by the Obama campaign, the poster was visually dynamic and politically effective. It radiated an aura of confidence and optimism. But Mr. Fairey\u2019s schematic rendering of Mr. Obama \u2014 branded by a single, amorphous word \u2014 reduced the candidate to a cartoonlike, racially ambiguous cipher.<\/p>\n

Raking across Mr. Obama\u2019s face, in a picture devoid of the color brown, was a broad swath of off-white paint, a metaphoric blank screen onto which voters were invited to project their dreams and aspirations. The \u201cHope\u201d poster visually transformed a man who unambiguously defined himself as black into an icon of the unthreatening \u201cpostracial\u201d politician…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meditation on President Obama\u2019s Portrait Lens Blog: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism The New York Times 2014-07-25 Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture University of Maryland, Baltimore County Dawoud Bey\u2019s photograph of the man who would soon be president was taken on a Sunday afternoon in early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,63,8,26,20],"tags":[17959,16557,2640,147,2327],"class_list":["post-37482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-dawoud-bey","tag-maurice-berger","tag-new-york-times","tag-photography","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}