Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op - New Edition

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments a In the first edition of Picture Perfect, I explored America’s fascination with image making in politics and the movies, in everyday life and on television, in popular culture and art photography from the 1960s through the early 90s. Given the dramatic changes brought by the Internet and the digital revolution, I was eager to take a fresh look at the media landscape—from network news to YouTube, from photo ops to Photoshop, from cell phone pictures to new trends in photojournalism—and so a new book was born from the old. This book got its start when I was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard ’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I am grateful to the faculty and fellows who were at the center at that time, including Marvin Kalb, Ellen Hume, Bill Wheatley, John Ellis, and Scott Matheson, and to the Markle Foundation, which awarded me a grant to support the writing of the first edition. To test my ideas about the changing role of images in television coverage of political campaigns, I interviewed some sixty-five network reporters and producers, media consultants, and politicians. I would like to thank all of them for their willingness to watch the videotaped excerpts I showed them, and to share their insights and experiences . I owe special thanks to Bob Schieffer, Sanford Socolow, Sander Vanocur, and Bill Wheatley for their generous help and support. Writing the new edition involved more than bringing the story of photo ops and image making into the age of Facebook and YouTube. It also involved thinking through the meaning of photography in politics and everyday life. I can think of no setting x a A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S more congenial than the Harvard Humanities Center, where, as a scholar in residence, I researched and wrote the new version of Picture Perfect. Homi Bhabha, the center’s director, Steve Biel, the executive director, and Mary Halpenny-Killip, the center’s gifted administrator, created a climate of bracing yet warm intellectual exchange. I would like to thank the students in my seminars at Harvard who were always brimming with ideas and insights, and especially my resourceful and talented research assistants—Katie Hatch, Meg Parekh, Carrol Chang, Ilan Graff, Joy Gragg, Gloria Park, Paula Nisbett, and Sherelle Ferguson. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend Susan Gilroy, the head reference librarian at Harvard’s Lamont Library, who was wonderfully generous with her time and research skills. For me, thinking and writing go best when they emerge from animated conversation—whether in the seminar room, at the dinner table, or on long walks with colleagues, family and friends. My ideas about images and image making were refined and enlarged through conversations with Jeffrey Abramson, Fouad Ajami, Pearl Bell, Sacvan Bercovitch, Homi Bhabha, Jackie Bhabha, Heather Campion, Chuck Campion, Jack Corrigan, Kathleen Corrigan, Diane Coutu, Jean Elshtain, Thomas Friedman , Marc Hauser, Stanley Hoffmann, Margo Howard, Ada Louise Huxtable, Alex Jones, Esther Kartiganer, Bill Kovach, Lisa Lieberman, Debby Loewenberg, Steve Love, Marcela Mahecha, Harvey Mansfield, Marcia Marcus, Russ Muirhead, Barbara Nor- fleet, Tom Patterson, Le Proctor, David Riesman, Tom Rosenstiel, Penny Savitz, Andy Savitz, Susan Shell, Sandy Socolow, Bernie Steinberg, Doris Sommer, Joy Sandel, Matthew Sandel, Judith Shklar, Monique Doyle Spencer, Valya Shapiro, and Susan Tifft. I was fortunate to work with Ian Malcolm, my editor at Princeton University Press, who believed in this book throughout, and shepherded it to publication with intelligence and grace. Dawn Hall, Sara Lerner, and Sol Kim Bentley provided invaluable help in bringing the book to completion. I am especially grateful for the support of my family. My brother Richard and my sisters Vicki and Debbie were a constant A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S a xi source of encouragement—reading chapters and offering many helpful comments. My sons Adam and Aaron spurred me on to the finish line, and provided many welcome writing breaks— cooking together, walking on the beach at Sanibel, and taking Asa for runs in the park. My father Albert Adatto, an immigrant to this country, made me alive to photos as markers of memory. Above all, I am grateful to my mother Lily Adatto and my husband Michael Sandel, the two people...