On Monotony: The best and worst of recount photography

Brie Cohen, shooting for the Albert Lea Tribune, got up and under to add drama to counting at the Freeborn County Government Center Wednesday.

A few government-issue desks or folding tables. Stacks of paper. Bleary-eyed officials peering at the umpteenth ink-smudged ballot. Minnesota has seen its share of surprisingly arresting imagery about mundane processes — meeting photos by Jerome Liebling and, more recently, Minneapolis’ Paul Shambroom’s four-year project in which he criss-crossed America photographing government convenings — but this week’s statewide recount has offered little in the way of fodder for photojournalists looking for compelling imagery.

While many valiant (and some successful) attempts have been made, the recount photos tend to be dull. And in fine-art photography, that can even be okay, at least according to Shambroom. A former news photographer, he presented his “Meetings” series as a set of 40 photos accompanied by full minutes of meetings, the blase faces of, say, the Marshfield, Missouri, aldermen mirroring the nouns and verbs that contribute to the tedium.

But in news, viewers have little time to pore over images and, with smaller sizes and lower-resolution printing, they likely have less interest in doing so. These images need to be emblematic, arresting.

“What works as a piece of art on the wall does not necessarily work as a news photo,” Shambroom says. “In fact, they’re sort of diametrically opposed.”

How would Shambroom photograph the recount if he was assigned to the job?  “I’d try to embrace the boredom,” he said. “That’s what I did in my ‘Meetings’ to make them interesting to me. I’d take what is the strongest visual quality of those situations, which is the boredom, and just kind of put my arms around it.” (Put on the spot by my Friday-afternoon call, he acknowledged he couldn’t yet say what that might look like.)

Shambroom adds that the most interesting recount photography he’s seen this week have been images of the disputed ballots themselves — a point St. Paul-based photographer Alec Soth made in an email to me today.

“I thought that these documents are more telling than (1) pundits (2) photographs of election booths, etc.,” Soth wrote. “Raw documentation, be it a cell-phone snap or a scan of a piece of paper to me seems more powerful.”

Now, a look at some of this week’s news photos:

The Star Tribune’s Larry Holt captures an election judged flanked by campaign monitors on Wednesday in Northeast Minneapolis.

Police tape adds visual interest – and DANGER! — in this New York Times photo by Caroline Yang.

Ditto for this Pioneer Press image shot by Scott Takushi in Hastings.

Elizabeth Flores of the Star Tribune gives a good glimpse of how annoying counting must be with challengers like Bob Murray of the Coleman campaign hovering over your shoulder.

MnIndy’s Paul Demko took a straightforward approach, capturing the recount — as this tallier’s facial expression suggests — in all its glorious tedium.

Then there’s the array of dull shots of white people with paper and tables:

The Farmington Independent

The Crookston Daily Times

The Worthington Daily Globe

Hands down, the best photography of the recount yet, as Soth and Shambroom concurred, show the ballots themselves — but not because of artistry. Documentation of challenged ballots illustrate clearly — and hilariously, at times — just what the Franken and Coleman camps are fighting over.