I spent the afternoon at the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office on 125th street in New York City. I'm sharing a few of the photographs I took there during this momentous event, and offering some thoughts on how this election and inauguration have begun to change the world of photography, especially from a citizen journalist's point of view.
I was certainly not the only photographer in the crowd today. It seemed everyone was attempting to document this entire day, in some form or another.
What's also interesting with this election is the amount of citizen journalism occurring. Just as Obama is the first president to begin to utilize the full power of the internet and social networking in his campaign, so to has the coverage of the election and this inauguration been the first to fully utilize these tools.
For example, Flickr is using images posted to their Inauguration 2009 group at their inauguration party in Washington DC... tonite. The Smithsonian is collecting images for their click! photography changes everything, which will explore how citizen photography has covered this past election. One of the most visible and ambitious plans is CNN's "The Moment", which will attempt to take every photograph taken in the crowd at the moment Obama was sworn in, and stitch them together into a vast, explorable, three-dimensional world.
It's an amazing new world we have entered today, in more ways than one. It's a road many of us have been traveling on for awhile, but as of today, we've begun to see the destination.