I don’t know why I started taking these photographs.
I suspect it was an attempt to mark a moment, or to hold onto a feeling.
I didn’t know about Katherine Opie’s polaroids of the Bush era at the time. If I had, I might not have taken these.

On November 4, 2008, Ted (my partner at the time) and I were on a couch watching the election on an old cube of a television. It was the last television that I would have cable on. Ted was wearing a t-shirt with Obama’s face on it. He’d purchased it at a Madonna concert a month earlier. As the excitement of the night mounted, I grabbed my polaroid camera and started taking photos of the screen.

I am Canadian and was in Canada at the time, but the energy of the night was still palpable. We wanted to spill out into the street, to celebrate; but the party was inside the television not outside our window.

Over the eight years that followed, my engagement with American politics ebbed and flowed. Occasionally, I would photograph a screen, typically a laptop or phone. Rarely was I photographing something that was happening. Instead, I was watching clips of things that had happened, searching them out online at my leisure.

I’d always planned to photograph the end of Obama’s Presidency. For years, I knew I needed to save a few Polaroids for that. On January 10, 2017, I watched President Obama’s farewell address alone on my computer screen. After the speech was over, I slid the progress bar on the video back and pressed pause before taking a last few photos.








©Zachary Ayotte