“Trump’s no Kim Kardashian, but their shared sense of visual branding defines this campaign.”
[Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images]
Every election has its iconic images. Or does it?
There are standout images from previous campaigns. Barack Obama’s “Hope” poster, with all its homages and parodies, is a classic example.
As the midterm campaigns got under way, images appeared that were used to characterize the politics of one side or the other. One June image that circulated widely showed a crying Honduran child allegedly separated from her parents at the border. Later we learned she and her mother were detained together.
Maybe that’s the difference. Thinking of icons as single images is so 20th century, a time when cameras were far less ubiquitous. But we’re all documenters and publishers now, and the photos we see come from a much wider range of sources.
Yet there is an image that shows up again and again this campaign season. It’s not a specific photo, it’s the face of a man, one who isn’t currently on the ballot.
Better photos may win awards, but the photos that stick have become a broad pool that reflects personalities, not events. Trump’s no Kim Kardashian, but their shared sense of visual branding defines this campaign, and this era, far more than any substantive moment: Today’s photographic icons may not depict what happened so much as who happened.
Bob Britten is a teaching associate professor at West Virginia University. The post originally appeared on the Conversation.
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