The last movie I saw in theaters was A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothee Chalamet. It failed to immerse me because so much of it was shot in Jersey City and Hoboken, using as backdrops streets that I traveled very frequently. Even when seated in the dark room with my senses overwhelmed by the enormous faces talking on the wall, I felt very grounded in the moment, which isn’t really the goal when you go to see a movie in a theater.
On Monday, I went to downtown Washington to take photos of the city during the inauguration. It was probably the closest I had ever been to the nation’s center of attention. I saw hordes of journalists from the country’s most important publications, and even got to meet a photographer I personally look up to. I also came face to face with the Proud Boys, who I’ve been reading about in the news for years. Watching documentary footage of the day on Tuesday, I could easily pick out myself and my friends. After living my whole life as a spectator to history, I had made it to the stage.
Being downtown that day felt a lot like being in that theater. I saw characters with starkly different backgrounds from mine, celebrating ideas that everyone abhorred around me and myself. I saw them wearing outrageous costumes, hurling slurs at counterprotestors and saying lines that nobody would dare speak aloud on my liberal college campus. The streets were subdivided by perimeters within perimeters, shifting the geography and landscape into something unrecognizable. It was as if I was inside of a movie. But it all felt very real.
Although the dramatic winter sunlight, glittering camera flash highlights and outlandish outfits might look like something I would see on CNN or Instagram, I saw them with my own two eyes. They were alien in origin, but I knew they were real because I was there, the same way I knew Timothee Chalamet wasn’t in the Greenwich Village but on Jersey Avenue. These photos are a permanent reminder.
Ben Ackman's Photography Website 