ZACHARY AYOTTE

Change

2008 - 2017

When I started taking this photographs in 2008, I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. I was caught up in the rush of the moment.
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.

As time passed, it became clear that the photographs were about changing landscape of media during Obama’s presidency. It has perhaps always been true that we can reshape any narrative to suit our version of the world. But as technology changed, our capacity to see what we wanted to see quickly shifted. These photographs were an attempt to record that shift.

Change

On November 4, 2008, when I took the first images here, 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.

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.