July 28, 2003 This is my favorite photo from my decade under the Capitol dome. Speaker of the Assembly Herb Wesson had ordered a lockdown; nobody could leave the Capitol until a budget was passed. I was there too, stuck in the press bay until an agreement was reached. During one of my late-night walks out on to the nearly vacant floor, I caught a faint whiff of cigar smoke. Through a window, I could see smoke rising from the second-floor portico – the unofficial outdoor lounge. I grabbed the longest lens I had, left the Capitol and found a vantage point in a nearby parking garage to see who was on the deck: a group of Assembly members – Democrats and Republicans together – taking a recess and enjoying cigars and scotch.
CBS war correspondent John Laurence once said that of all media, it is the craft of still photography that comes “closest to showing the truth.”
As a photojournalist, this belief resides in my DNA – and wielding a camera to capture moments of truth in our state Capitol should have been a far easier task than working in a war zone. Or so my editors thought more than a decade ago when the Los Angeles Times shipped me to Sacramento.
My mission was clear: Give newspaper readers an unvarnished look at the legislative process, conveying the figurative hand-to-hand battle between Democrats and Republicans, North and South, the Coast and the Valley.
My colleagues took bets I’d grow bored and return to L.A. for the exhilaration of covering run-and-gun breaking urban news. And they had a point. It’s hard to make a scintillating photograph of people talking – and waiting – in a place where the few visual opportunities tend to be contrived affairs.
From Day One, I hitched myself to one constant guidepost: authenticity – seeking to capture in even the most staged event an unscripted moment or shard of history. The photos in a free public exhibit opening in the Capitol on Monday reflect some of those moments.
Over the years, I watched our state Capitol morph into an ever more tightly scripted venue, testament to a Hollywood governor, the sophistication of polling and handlers, and the seismic jolt to the media landscape known as the Internet. Politicians are increasingly guarded, fearing anything they say or do could spread virally on the Web to haunt their political careers.
Perhaps my most chilling image from 10 years covering the Capitol is one depicting the notebooks and hands of a dozen reporters surrounding a speakerphone for a conference-call news conference. It was the ultimate staged event without even the need for a stage, and a precursor to today’s epidemic of Web statements and e-mail interviews.
Yet the political instincts behind these thoroughly vetted exchanges run counter to the veracity the public craves. Corporate America, nonprofits and other organizations already have begun to recognize that authenticity is an asset – not a liability. Outside of my ongoing photojournalism work, I am constantly amazed at the lack of scripting in assignments from the larger world beyond the Capitol. Often I am asked to shoot things as they truly are. Period.
My decade under the dome was a time of great change, with turnover sped up by term limits, the historic recall of a governor and a feast-to-famine budget. I feel privileged to have documented this era through authentic glimpses of our democracy in action.
Photo exhibit
“Decade Under the Dome: A Photojournalist’s Quest for Authenticity in the People’s House” is open to the public March 1-15 in the Capitol’s basement rotunda from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends.
April 15, 2004 I call it the Magic Marble Path, the 100-foot corridor that connects the Governor’s Office to the press conference room, 1190. This pathway always offered a sense of visual anticipation and possibility. The governor’s security detail would block off the area 20 minutes ahead of time, tourists would gather sometimes 10-deep behind the velvet ropes, and the governor would emerge this day with Danny DeVito and Clint Eastwood, who were named the newest members of the California Film Commission.
