The Deja Vu of the Republican National Convention
My photos from RNC Cleveland, 2016 (and a hot photography tip)
Welcome to In the Flash, a weekly, behind-the-lens dialogue on photography. To join the conversation
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.
The enraptured faces of the attendees showed how mistaken the media was at the time. The convention was the first enthronement of Trump, with all the fever and cult-like ecstasy promising his inevitable victory. I saw the same vigor in the current images of the RNC. Everyone knows exactly where we are headed from here.
One of my favorite photos from RNC is an image of an African-American security guard during the national anthem. I focused on the man’s uncomfortable expression as a contrast to the rapture around him. The photo supported my own cognitive dissonance. Trump’s racist and sexist rhetoric was much more jarring the first time around, and it was hard to believe how either minorities or women would succumb to his message. In 2024, Trump’s support from black and Latino voters has doubled.
A fellow Substack writer and artist, Molly Crabapple, shared her account of the 2016 RNC where she was commissioned to draw the convention for the Daily Beast. I highly recommend reading it. The drawings are a visceral, biting commentary on the proceedings. And just like recognizing the familiar faces in the recent photos, I have picked out the same characters in her work and my photos.
For those who stayed with me till the end, here is a hot photography tip — never delete the larger edit of a shoot, and leave as many photos as possible. I used to trash most of my assignments, with only the chosen images remaining. That was a mistake. The relevancy of images changes as the years pass, and my favorite images often slide into irrelevancy while outtakes acquire new meaning. I found many of the photos I shared in this newsletter in the “Trash” folder that I somehow forgot to delete.
Find me on Instagram @dina_litovsky
"I used to trash most of my assignments, with only the chosen images remaining. That was a mistake. The relevancy of images changes as the years pass, and my favorite images often slide into irrelevancy while outtakes acquire new meaning"
To a large degree that's what Chris Marker's Sans Soleil is, sorting through the discards of his journalist and activist past and questioning what he actually saw. This includes an unnerving sequence where he shows footage he shot of Luis Cabral pinning a medal to a weeping Major Nino in Cassaque in 1980, while the voiceover explains that Nino would be sending Cabral to prison one year later:
"We will learn that in this ceremony of promotions which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle, there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness, and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion, but the wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above the others."
Then some poetic pontification against the horrors of history and determined forgetting that I'd also love to quote, but anyway the point is keep your discards because the subjects' story might change.
Sure it's not a cult!
Great post.
Sad for our country.