Political Stagings - USA 2008

Jean-Robert Dantou

I’ve been working for several years on different symbolic spaces in contemporary French political life (party seats, television studios, meeting rooms). My interest in such sites is two-fold: I photograph spaces which represent current political life for documentary and historical purposes, while critically questioning these spaces in which media images are fabricated. After working on the French presidential campaign in 2007, distributed by Agence Vu and published in Le Monde for the seven weeks preceding the first round of the French elections, I decided to commence a body of work in partnership with the Picturetank co-operative, on one of the major political events of this new century: the Obama/McCain campaign of 2008. I’ve been working in the United States since the beginning of August 2008, focusing on meeting spaces between campaigners and the two presidential candidates. Through photographs depicting the spectacle and the artifices of a presidential campaign, I aim to speak about the play of imagery at work in contemporary political life. On the one hand, the campaign teams exercise an extremely tight control of image production, on the other, the candidates minutely control their every gesture, attitude and glance. Finally, at the end of the chain are the campaigners and spectators, who are not entirely fooled by the fiction playing out before them, but who are nonetheless trying to believe it. I aim to describe the various processes at work in this extraordinary campaign. On the one hand, enormous rallies, assembling tens of thousands of spectators, in which everything is controlled: a specific emplacement provided for photographers, another reserved for television cameras, another for the printed press, another for radios. Each space is chosen by publicity teams according to the angle that they want the various mediums to adopt. The television crews are in the heart of the arena, the photographers face the campaigners’ flags and the radio stations are positioned alongside the loudest groups. At the opposite extreme are the minimalist meetings, which may be qualified as ‘post-theatrical’, organised in the heart of the forest or in airport hangars, which assemble a few dozen hand-picked campaigners, and often just as many (or more) journalists to cover them. These new forms of rallies try to create an impression of proximity between candidate and citizen, the latter being the most obvious target of political communication. The photographic and televisual images which arise from these debates show a candidate who appears, in a very natural way, amidst a group of common citizens – a representation which denies the totally constructed nature of the actual situation, including kilometres of roads blocked by security services, snipers posted on the surrounding houses, dozens of television trucks in the middle of nowhere, antennae pointing to the sky and strictly defined perimeters marked out on the ground, within which each actor (candidate, campaigners, press) are ordered to remain. Perhaps more so than the grand theatres, these ‘natural’ sites, in the middle of forests, most clearly communicate the media circus of political life and the illusions of a contemporary electoral campaign.