Obama Speech: The Problem With Photographing a TV Show

I was walking home through my Brooklyn neighborhood during Barack Obama's acceptance speech last night. Outside nearly every storefront – bars, restaurants, shops – you could hear a TV tuned to the speech with the volume up. This was a national television moment. (Update: Nielsen estimates the speech was watched by 38 million people.)

One thing about TV moments is that they become etched in our minds as motion and sound. I just spent a few minutes clicking through half a dozen online galleries of Obama photos, as well as the many Obama images on today's newspaper front pages. There are many strong photographs, of course, but there's also that unsatisfying feeling that we saw all this material on TV already. It's hard to tease a still image out of what is essentially a TV show.

Of the work I've seen from the speech so far, my favorite is this sequence by Alan Chin published on the BagnewsNotes blog. Black and white, tightly edited — no words, motion or audio necessary. It's the story of the speech in just four frames.