The Deja Vu of the Republican National Convention
My photos from RNC Cleveland, 2016 (and a hot photography tip)
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The Republican National Convention just finished taking place this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and my Instagram feed is full of photos from the event. Some of my favorite photographers covering the convention are Evan Jenkins for TIME, Sinna Nasseri for the New Yorker and Mark Peterson for New York Magazine. Looking at their images has been a disorienting case of deja vu. I photographed RNC in 2016 in Cleveland, and other than the bandage on Trump’s ear, nothing seems to have changed. I recognized the same attendees that I have captured in my images, a bit older and just as committed.
Photographing the RNC was my first big political assignment of the election cycle, in which I continued to work at (mostly Republican) rallies, conventions, and finally the Trump election party and the Inauguration. Four years later, I photographed the Biden Inauguration, and 2016 felt like a collective hallucination. Looking through the current RNC coverage has made it real again.
Curious to look back at my RNC coverage, I went back to the photos from Cleveland. At the time, no one thought that Trump would actually win, and the media treated the convention as more of a circus than a real threat. For my assignment for Buzzfeed, I focused on all the secondary players — workers, servers, merchandise sellers — but now that angle felt less relevant. With the hindsight of the last eight years, I picked out photos of Trump devotees, mostly women, that were never published.
