Maximum Exposure: Students Work With the Huffington Post and Urge Convention Goers to Photograph

During my first few weeks as a Junior Fellow, Geoffrey Cowan, Director of the Center on Communication Leadership, University Professor and holder of the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership, shared an idea for a project that involved photographic empowerment and citizen journalism.

The concept: empower individuals witnessing the Presidential Race to become active participants by using their cameras. We realized that people were at events of all kinds regarding the 2008 Presidential Race- some were at conventions or rallies, and some just happened to be in the same hotel as delegates or reporters. We wanted to give individuals who were once passive observers the opportunity to become engaged and empowered participants of the political process by documenting their experiences with the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

We partnered with the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus and launched a page for our convention coverage through citizen photographs. We dubbed the project Maximum Exposure and asked readers attending the conventions to send their photos. We received a total of 2,179 in just fourteen days.

Convention goers were particularly surprised by the police presence and were able to share this with us. We found that citizens used photography not only to document what they witnessed, but to communicate their feelings of suppression by the tight security in Denver. We saw photographs of law enforcement prohibiting demonstrators from protesting, and disgruntled protesters screaming back at law enforcement. In St. Paul, outraged citizens sent us their coverage of police forces that used violence to end a protest. Citizens that may have felt powerless when experiencing or witnessing these events were able to use photography as a way to combat these feelings. Even if a person did not physically speak out to an officer when feeling that her/his rights were compromised, they were able to find a voice through their photography and know that one of the premier online news blogging sites would serve as their platform.

By partnering with the Institute for Photographic Empowerment, who “supports the study and practice of participant-produced documentary projects in photography, film, and digital media,” and the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus, a pioneer of citizen journalism, we experienced what happens when citizen photojournalism becomes a reality.

Thanks to Marc Cooper and Amanda Michel of the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus; Geoffrey Cowan, Deb Lawler, Geoff Baum and Megan Baaske of the Center on Communication Leadership; and Lynn Warshafksy and Pablo Toledo of IPE, we were able to bring this project to life within ten days.

We’re now further analyzing the submitted photographic content. For more information, feel free to contact Rebecca Shapiro at rcshapir@usc.edu, or visit our Maximum Exposure archive.

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