We are at a crossroads. It is the beginning of a new administration and the end of an old one. There are those who would like to forget the last eight years. It’s the magic-slate idea. As if you could lift up an acetate window and those eight years would suddenly vanish.Photographs make this somewhat more difficult. They are a partial record of who we were and how we imagined ourselves. They remind us that we have a past and that we are the sum of our past experiences. They reassert that unassailable fact.
The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration.
There are overlapping pictures — of the president with a bullhorn at Ground Zero, of the president looking out the window of Air Force One over New Orleans, of the president receiving the news on the morning of 9/11. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way.
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