Next Tuesday, Aug. 26, the Asheville Blade will cover the next meeting of our local city council. Here’s an interesting — and often hilarious — account Max Cooper, who photographed the last meeting for the Blade, wrote about photographing our local government meetings.
I covered public meetings once or twice a week for two years. For the most part, meeting photos are a strange journo ritual in which the frontline journos spend an evening sitting on the floor in the council chamber because the middle-management journos couldn’t think of a better way to cover the story. I was anxious to leave this part of newspaper life behind.
So it was weird when I found myself actually looking forward to covering city council for the Asheville Blade. Not only did it represent a milestone in the Blade’s emergence on the local media scene, I’ve come to look at meeting photos as a challenge bizarrely akin to haiku: You have very little to work with, and you have to present it within a strict structure, and no one will really understand it when you’re through.
So that’s my strategy for staying awake. I envy the reporters, who can stay awake simply by tweeting:
Sitting in the front row seats that are reserved for the press makes you feel like a real pro. Unfortunately, it’s a terrible angle. So I spend most of my time on the floor, because that’s where the photos are. Actually, the photos are on the stairs next to the dais, but when I tried to sit there one time the cops made me leave. Something about “preserving the dignity of the chamber.” Guess they haven’t read the news.
Anyway, from the floor, you can get great shots of people with the chamber architecture behind their heads. Here’s our police chief . . . with a halo:
And here’s Vice Mayor Marc Hunt, looking like he’s about to run for President:
I’m pretty sure that the chamber was designed specifically to thwart photographers. The dais is high and made of the same wood as the walls, so everyone looks like a very serious disembodied head. As if that weren’t enough, all the councilfolk have laptops open in front of them, so they’re lit from below with an eerie blue glow.
I find that the low angle and sinister lighting give the photography a very cinematic feel. For example, here’s Council member Gordon Smith, complete with skull-and-crossbones tie, looking like a Gotham commissioner in a Batman movie:
And here’s city manager Gary Jackson, looking like the villain in the same movie:
On top of all that, the chamber walls are — I’m not kidding — actually green. At first I thought this was just a white balance issue, but on one occasion reporter David Forbes and I were allowed to tour the chamber alone, and I took test shots that prove it. It’s like some strange sort of bureaucratic algae.
But the biggest pain in the ass most exciting challenge about covering council is my nemesis, the projector.
It’s always there. It’s always on. Shooting around it is like trying to take a photo of Mount Doom with the unblinking eye of Sauron in the foreground. Shoot too low and flare destroys the image. Stand up and you cast a shadow on whatever vital government Powerpoint slide is currently displayed.
So it’s a wonder I get any photos at all. But over the years I’ve amassed quite a collection of public figures looking very serious . . .
. . . and one day I’m going to make a presentation of all my public-figure-gesturing photos, presented over a soundtrack of “Stop in the Name of Love.”
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More of local photographer Max Cooper’s work can be found at Max Cooper Photography. This post originally appeared in his blog there.
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