ƒ/8.0 | 1/800 | ISO100
Ocean Beach
Going way back into the archives for this one, a photo dear to my heart as it was one that got me holding onto my camera again, carrying it with me as much as I could and trying to take more photographs as I went through my life. Just a random moment, catching a kid running down a sand dune on a beautiful day in San Francisco.
ƒ/4.9 | 1/60 | ISO800
44 | Nov. 4th, 2008
Why not a throwback to a time when things were looking totally different for the world? I remember this day so well: I was working the floor at the Ralph Lauren Rugby store in Chicago constantly checking the computer for updates as to how the election was unfolding. I had recently returned from spending the summer in East Hampton, New York watching the richest community I’d ever lived in look on in horror as their August vacations were being cancelled left and right as the banks on Wall Street were collapsing in an epic worldwide economic meltdown.
You might not remember, but Obama spent the first 10 months of 2008 campaigning on changing the world based on one word: Hope. He represented the next sea change that my generation was desperately clamouring for. We had been raised in the 1990s with so much wealth dripping around us, it was a huge shock that our educations were being sold at prices that were going to saddle us with debt for the same amount of time a mortgage would by the same people that our parents told us to vote for who happened to love sending our peers off to die in wars that were sold on lies.
Obama was a new thing. A chance for the USA to go forward into this economic crisis and re-write how we would rule the world as the greatest country on earth. Obama declared, “This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”
Looking back we know it took only 3 years for Obama to forget he included in his speech was this passage: “Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.” Because it only took 3 year for the Millennial segment of Obama’s movement to move on from him and become Occupy Wall Street. Had Obama listened to this movement, where would we be now?
But I digress, I was working on the sales floor of Rugby, checking updates and simultaneously trying to get my ticket to be at this historic event. After countless disappointing refreshes of the site, I checked in with my mom and found that one of her co-workers had gotten a ticket that wouldn’t be used and I jumped at the chance to meet her downtown and go see Obama give his first speech as President-elect. The energy of this moment was unparalleled as a quarter of a million people filed into Grant Park to catch a glimpse of the man that meant so much to the world at that time. What a moment it was.