Pulitzer Prize Winner 2009: Damon Winter, Campaign: Obama

When we think about modern-era photographic coverage of the American political process, we are most often drawn to the very intimate, behind-the-scenes work by photographers P.F. Bentley and Diana Walker of Time magazine. These photographers were given exclusive, almost 24-hour access to the candidate on a daily basis. Their coverage provides a glimpse into the inner workings of a campaign and into the life of a candidate not seen by other photographers, much less the public. Earlier this year The New York Times photographer Damon Winter shattered the myth that this kind of exclusive access is a prerequisite to great campaign photography. Winter snagged the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his coverage of the Obama Campaign with a stellar 20-image portfolio consisting primarily of images that were accessible to any enterprising photographer on the campaign trail. Says Winter, “Everyone thinks that because you work for The New York Times you get this amazing access but I found myself hoping for bits and scraps here and there along with everyone else.”

Winter is quick to credit the flexibility of his editors, particularly David Scull, who served as the national political editor for photography during the campaign; and Michelle McNally, assistant managing editor for photography. “My editors constantly pushed me to go beyond the straightforward images on the stage and think outside the box,” says Winter.

As a result, he never felt the pressure to produce the bread and butter campaign images most photographers were looking for. Instead, Winter spent the majority of his time at a rally scoping out the periphery and the faces in the crowd—searching for the visual components to make his campaign story more complete. “With Obama,” he says, “the story was as much about the crowds and the excitement his campaign generated as it was about the candidate himself.”

While Columbia University oversees and administers the Pulitzer awards, it’s also where Winter’s career as a photographer was born. Perhaps it is only fitting that winning the Pulitzer Prize involved a return trip to the university for him.

As a sophomore at Columbia studying Environmental Science, Winter asked his mother for a point-and-shoot camera so that he could document his college years. His mother instead surprised him with a Canon Elan SLR complete with manual focus and exposure control.
 
Winter found he had no interest in research projects and labs. Instead he preferred to spend his time looking at the world through his camera lens. He loved the camera so much he would walk around and visually explore, just looking through the lens even when he had no money to buy film.

Winter’s father is a scientist and his mother is an artist, creating the “perfect storm” genetically for producing photographically inclined offspring. Winter laughs good-naturedly at this suggestion, conceding that perhaps some of these scientific and artistic inclinations are indeed encoded in his DNA, “perhaps a rational side from my dad and a more creative side from my mom,” he comments.

“My work is probably more influenced by the fact that I want to exert a lot of control over my images,” he clarifies. “I like everything to be neat and tidy and clean. Sometimes I wish my photography was a little looser—perhaps that comes from being more of a control freak than any artistic or scientific influence,” he says.

Perhaps it is this very convergence of left-brain/right-brain tendencies that enabled Winter to transform the chaotic and complex atmosphere surrounding a modern-day political campaign into an artistic, yet clear and concise storyline.

Winter had been at The New York Times for less than a year in 2007 when political photo editor David Scull started looking for volunteers for campaign coverage. Winter initially spent time on the campaign covering John Edwards and to a lesser degree Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney before finally settling into a three-photographer Obama rotation with Times colleagues Doug Mills and Ozier Muhammad. Rotations lasted anywhere from two to five weeks at a time.

While Mills is a battle-tested veteran with six presidential campaigns under his belt, Winter had never been out on the trail before. He says, “I had never covered anything like that, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. It’s such a competitive situation. I found that without guidance, it’s easy to get this tunnel vision where you think you’ve got to fight it out with all the other photographers. You feel like you’ve got to stay as close to the candidate as possible and stick to him like glue. I eventually realized that this approach didn’t work and it’s not sustainable in covering a campaign over the course of a year.”

Winter says his editor helped make things easier by setting out some basic guidelines early on in the campaign coverage. “David said he only wanted to see about 35 percent photos of the candidates themselves and about 65 percent from everything else.”

Comments David, “We encouraged Damon and all the photographers to not just take the center position and shoot the candidate. We wanted them to look around the edges to find interesting ways to illustrate the story without the candidate in the frame.” He continues, “You can evoke a far more visual response from the reader with a metaphorical image than you can with a literal image, and that’s what we wanted from our photographers.”

The most beneficial aspect of Scull’s guidance, however, was in promising the photographers that he would never second guess them with a “why don’t you have that” type of phone call. This gave them the freedom to leave the candidate at the podium and explore the periphery without fear of failure should the candidate make news while they were looking the other way.

This freedom didn’t come without some disadvantages, though. With blogs and websites the news cycle is a full 24 hours per day with constant deadlines. “We were producing a political blog that used pictures throughout the day. If we didn’t want to see wire pictures on our website we had to be as fast as the wires in getting the pictures back, but at the same time we had to be different and creative,” says Winter. “It’s a national paper and the best picture is going to run whether it comes from the staff or the wire. It’s always tough on a big national story because you’re competing with a lot of other photographers for space in your own newspaper.” He adds, “It’s nice to know they are willing to be a little more adventurous and take more visual risks than some other places.”

Indeed, when covering a campaign with anywhere from 20–60 photographers following a candidate, it’s often easier to follow the pack than break away on your own. Experienced campaign photographers will tell you that when you find yourself in a spot all by yourself, it’s either a really good thing or a really bad thing—and more often than not it’s just really bad.

Winter says he found it a bit easier to break away from the pack since there was no pressure from the picture desk to present the straightforward image. “When everyone was gathered in one spot, I would remind myself that it was okay for me to shoot somewhere else. I know that if I’m in the same spot with everyone else, we’re all going to get basically the same picture.
The paper could get that picture from the wire. I tried to provide something different by seeing things from a different perspective.” On the contrary, Winter continues, “An interesting thing about a campaign is that you can have 20 people all in the same space looking at the same thing, and you can get 20 different takes on a moment. There were plenty of times I looked over at another photographer’s work and would think, ‘That’s a great picture’ or ‘I totally didn’t see that.’ That’s just how it goes in the day-to-day coverage… What was most important to me was that I never worried I was going to miss something or have my editor ask, ‘Why didn’t you get that?’ ”

From a more pragmatic sense, Winter adds, “We were in really tough economic times and spending a ton of money covering the campaign. If I sent back the same pictures [my editors] were seeing from everyone else, it’s pretty hard to justify spending the money for me to be there.”

Furthermore, Winter eschewed the “standard” photojournalism complement of gear generally consisting of a couple of cameras and a few zooms. Instead he chose fast prime lenses and full frame Canon EOS 5D cameras that are slower than the Canon 1 series bodies most journalists carry.

While he admits it’s a little risky to enter into the competitive environment of a political campaign shooting at f/1.2 or f/1.4, Winter says, “You have to take risks and put yourself out there to give yourself a chance to do something different. If you play it safe all the time, you’re never going to give yourself a chance to do something really special.”

Winter did indeed pull off something special, and not only with the images themselves but also with a clever packaging of his Pulitzer entry. One of the first things readily apparent in viewing his portfolio is that it doesn’t follow the chronology of the campaign. The fifth image is an election night photograph of an African-American man crying after learning that Obama had won. Comments Winter, “One thing the Times wanted to avoid with the entry was a chronological coloring of the events of the campaign. The story is more about the feel, the mood and what it was like for the people witnessing this historic undertaking.” He continues, “Since I was in a three-photographer rotation, there were a lot of major news moments I wasn’t there for. For us to make the entry a chronology didn’t make sense. It’s not what I had and not how I covered the campaign. The editors packaged it the way they thought had the best feel, both visually and content-wise.”

Of winning the Pulitzer, Winter says only this: “So many photojournalists see it as the pinnacle of their career, always hoping to win, but never thinking it will happen. When it’s over, life just continues and you pick up where you left off.”

SIDEBAR: Election of a Lifetime
Winter says that while out on the campaign he would get into a “real rhythm,” operating on five hours of sleep and running on adrenaline. Days usually started at 5 a.m. and went until midnight, with sometimes three or four flights along the way. He details, “You get used to having no personal time—zero. The first few days after you come home you feel like you’re missing out on something, but after two to three days of a sane life you wonder what you were thinking when you volunteered for the assignment in the first place.”

On election night and, subsequently, at the inauguration, Winter says it was hard to be a regular person and just take it all in.  “Election night was pretty incredible on a personal level because we had all come on this fascinating journey over the course of a year. All the work we had done up to that point was leading to this moment. To see the culmination of all this work end in [Obama’s] election was amazing.

“Being there and being so close, it was hard to have any perspective on it. You’re so focused on doing your work, meeting your deadline and executing your photography it’s very hard to absorb the weight of it.

“I don’t remember at what point, but there was definitely this unmistakable feeling that you were observing a really important time in our history. There were many occasions when I was on the plane and would look around at my colleagues and want to pinch myself. Here I am working for The New York Times, which was always my dream, and I’m covering what may be the most important election of my lifetime. It was an incredible feeling.”

View more of Damon Winter’s work at www.damonwinter.com.

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Greg Gibson’s 20-year career encompasses thousands of national and international assignments while he worked for some of the largest news organizations in the world. Name any major newspaper or magazine in the world—Greg’s been published in it. The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, Time, Life, Newsweek, People and Vanity Fair are just a few of the many prestigious publications that regularly display his work. His assignments have included three presidential campaigns, daily coverage of the White House, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Persian Gulf War, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and hundreds of sporting events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the NCAA basketball tournament and The Masters.