The AIGA Polling Place Photo Project struck me as a particularly smart mix of social application, viral site, and activism. For today’s election, everyone was invited to upload five photos at a time, complete with titles and captions, to the site. The upload required what amounts to a profile in addition to the images, creating, if the url structure is any indication, a “voter ID” for each group of images uploaded. As each set of images counts as one result, the project is richer than it looks with a basic search. Select Virginia and 12 results are returned; clicking on one of the thumbnails and you see the first page of that voter’s set—my set has five images, some sets have one. During the upload, a user can also tag the images, which should yield some very interesting visualizations in the coming weeks; as of yet, there is no tag cloud on the site, and while tag clouds are trendy widgets, one might have been a useful prompt for the image upload page.

The most promising aspect of the project, besides the obvious, leveling temporal limitation, is the probable imagined community created today that social applications always aim to achieve and usually fail to do, staggering into NASMdom instead. The parameters were clear: only U.S. polling sites and only this election; condensing the bewildering interestingness that is Flickr encourages exploring; my current favorite three images are a Californian garage polling place in a private residence, workers on fabulous orange and yellow chairs in Chesterfield, MA, and, as the title says, “The Handomest Guy in the Room”.

The images also indicate how comfortable the photographer felt in and around the polling place; if I had used my cameraphone, my experience might have been very different. I was stopped, questioned repeatedly, and gawked at with my SLR. I asked politely if I could take a picture of the greeter and the electronic ballot display on a scanner-size device near the door of Alumni Hall and then repeated my request to the “Chief” who called “Downtown”, narrowed his eyes at my overalls and bare face; no make-up and an SLR with a 70-300 zoom lens—clearly, I was dangerous. And I was denied.

I began the morning at a middle school polling place nearer my house than my designated location; I went in and feigned ignorance until they directed me “down the magic road to Lowe’s” to the elementary school where my name appears on the list. Outside Agnor-Hurt Elemenary, I first saw someone explaining the sample ballot.

I went in and asked permission to take a picture of the panel, waiting for voters to move out of the shot (I was told I could not take pictures of voters).

I then drove to Alumni Hall; the women outside reminded me of my grandmother’s friends; I took this shot from the other side of the parking lot and decided to keep visiting locations.

Listening to Ani, I drove over to Cherry Avenue, where I was a little concerned to see a sheriff in a yellow rain outfit talking to people under their pitched tent. I considered congratulating the woman on discovering how to rock galoshes, but decided to keep moving along.

A few hours later, I returned to the elementary school and was asked by a leaving voter why I was taking pictures. He seemed confused by the PPPP, and how the line of signs would function in an archive. Spaced a few feet apart, the signs line the school’s uphill drive, each one cancelling the one in front (and behind).

Back over on Cherry, the sheriff had his squad car lights flashing in the middle lane while he directed traffic a few feet away from the flare. A drop of rain mars this shot—the rain was blowing into the lens.

This woman kept adjusting her sign, squinting into the lights of oncoming traffic.

Verdict:

citizen journalism: hard

stickers: good

Related posts:

1. Whirling Text
2. The kthread Photoshop Power Move
3. With Aplomb

1. Ben:
   November 9th, 2006 at 10:29 am

   Great post. Your photography captures a sensation I feel whenever I vote; namely, that I’ve traveled into the past. The whole enterprise feels so benighted. Interestingly, Albemarle County, historically quite conservative, went for Webb this time.

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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006, 11:59 am * Filed in Design, Photography. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.