Could there be anything more boring than pictures of people in meetings? The White House doesn't seem to think so. The White House Photostream at Flickr is filled with photographs like this one: people sitting around a table, or in a circle of chairs in the Oval Office, talking, gesturing, taking notes, listening.
Take this photograph, for example, made this past Monday by White House photographer Pete Souza. According to its caption, this is a photograph of President Obama "meeting with heathcare reform stakeholders in the Roosevelt Room." 21 people (mostly white men) are gathered around a conference table. The "stakeholders" are mostly silent, while the President does the talking and gesturing. He's on the far right of the image, but everyone (including FDR) is looking at him, so that's where we look too. Apart from noticing (yet again) the visual symbolism of FDR (you want him on that wall! you need him on that wall!), this photograph is pretty uninspired.
Judging from the photo alone, the meeting above certainly does not look like the adjectives used this week to describe it: "significant," "a watershed event" and "remarkable." Indeed, most news reports suggest that folks around the table had probably agreed to particular concessions before they ever got to the Roosevelt Room. Yet in only two days it has already circulated as the visual marker of an important moment in the history of health care reform. Whatever happens from here - whether this image is later seen to mark the beginning of real reform or, as one story put it, it turns out to have been just another "photo-op"- it does have an important rhetorical function. Souza's photo (and the many others like it) serves as a visual record of the first rule of deliberation: getting everyone to sit down at the same table. And you can be sure that Obama wants us to know that's more than some past presidents have been able to do.
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