In 7 Days: Imprinting a Moment of History Nicola Green, Matt Frei, Sarah E. Lewis, and Alex Dimsdale.

At The Library of Congress https://vimeo.com/36981080

On October 5th 2011, the British Council partnered with the Library of Congress in Washington to celebrate their acquisition of the series of prints Nicola Green produced in response to her experience following then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008. The artist herself joined us for a panel discussion about her work with journalist Matt Frei of the UK’s Channel 4, art historian Sarah E. Lewis, and Alex Dimsdale from The British Council moderating.

Nicola Green Social Change and the American Presidential Campaign

Alex Dimsdale: I’d like to introduce you to our star-studded panel. Starting with Sarah E Lewis, ​ Sarah is a brilliant scholar and curator, also the most glamorous Art Historian that I think I’ve ever seen…

Sarah E Lewis: Come to New York! ​

Alex Dimsdale: She’s also perfectly placed to talk about the transatlantic nature of the pieces, ​ because she began her career at the Tate gallery in London, and then has also worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is about to take up a job, in fact, at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she’s also writing a book about art and how incepts with politics in the Nineteenth Century, so she’ll be able to give us a really interesting perspective on that. Sarah is also on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee so she’ll have an interesting take on that. Next up, Matt Frei, who you will all know as the former BBC correspondent, he headed up BBC World News America, which was a programme I used to work on actually as a lowly producer, and he was always wonderful! Matt has since then been poached by Channel 4 News, Matt covered the 2008 campaign extensively, and I really can’t think of someone better to talk about that particular political moment because he has this wonderful as an insider and an outsider as well, which it will be interesting to contrast with Nicola’s perspective as an artist. Which brings me to Nicola, Nicola is the heroine of the hour tonight, she’s the creator of these really extraordinary works that you see hanging around us. Nicola graduated with distinction from the University of Edinburgh College of Art, and since then her work has been shown on both sides of the Atlantic, at the Courtauld Gallery in London, at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. She’s also got a particularly interesting personal take on politics in that she’s married to the British Politician David Lammy, so that’s fed into some of her work. I’d like to kind of start things off by just asking Nicola a little bit about when you created the work, what were you, what did you want to achieve when you set out to make these pieces?

Nicola Green: Well, I think I’m going to go right back to 2005, when I was pregnant with our first ​ son, and my husband actually came on a trip to the US and met Obama, and came back and told me that he was thinking of running. As a mother, pregnant with my child, and thinking about the world that my child was going to come into, I really started turning my attention to what this world was going to look like. And, thinking as a mother who was actually going to have children that were actually going to look different to me, that was something that I really started to think about in ernest. As an artist it’s my job to look at people and think about their stories, and the stories that surround them, and this was really a powerful story. Then in 2007, when I was pregnant with our second son, I met Michelle, who came over shortly after the campaign started, who came over to the UK. I met her in London, and I was incredibly inspired and determined in that moment that I needed to tell this story for my children and for their generation, and I really wanted to use that opportunity to think about all themes contained in this story in much greater detail, as an artist. So, I asked Obama if I could do a portrait, and I thought it would be one trip and one portrait. I was able to go to Denver where he accepted the nomination, but as soon as I was there I realised it was a story that was much much bigger than him. It was a story about all of us really, it was a story about the campaign, the campaign staff, it was a story about the American people, but it was also a story about the global community that were watching. So I made many trips from that moment in Denver to inauguration, and I drove through the rain, and I did lots of drawings with people standing through the night waiting to go and queue to go to see him speak in different parts of America. I took hundreds of photographs and did hundreds of drawings in my sketch book, some of which you can see in the little pamphlet that you’ve got on your chairs. And then I would go home after these trips and take all of these drawings and photographs and experiences, and I would make more drawings and I would use the silkscreen print method to expand the themes in my creative process, and then try and distill and think through that research, in a way, what these themes meant and how to contain all of these stories into one set of work, and what I ended up with was these seven large silkscreen prints. Each one is a literal distillation of my experience of one trip, or a combination of days on trips, as well as distilling the wider thematic journey in the story. So for me, this work as a collection of seven images is a deconstruction of hope, and what that actually is, so what happens when people come together to try and make something happen. I wanted to tell that more universal story, so that my children and generations after them, and all of us, could be reminded of what we can achieve, whatever it is that we want to achieve.

Alex Dimsdale: It was an incredible time and you were sort of flying backwards and forwards across ​ the Atlantic, I know everyone here was probably watching it, really completely focused on this extraordinary moment that was happening. I just thought it would be interesting to ask, I want to ask all of you, but I guess starting with Sarah, what was your strongest visual memory, what’s your strongest visual image that you can remember from the election campaign?

Sarah E Lewis: Wow, you know really there’s several, there’s so many, in fact for me I have a sort of ​ corpus of them in my mind. But, the one that pops up most viscerally, most immediately when people ask that, is perhaps because of the incredulity of that moment, something that maybe no photograph could capture, and it was my own visual memory of sitting, where I was, in my, then, New Haven apartment trying to finish a dissertation, begun on British Council funding- thank you for that, when I was at Oxford University! Making good on my promise to complete it! And so I was being diligent, and I was writing, and all of a sudden my ears were just pierced by that sound of not just joy, but joy that comes when something that you’d never thought would happen occurs. All throughout the city of New Haven, when I was based up there, you could hear people just screaming on the night of the election, and that to me is actually the memory, it’s almost the blackness of that night just pierced with all those sounds.

Alex Dimsdale: How about you Matt? You were travelling with the campaign. ​

Matt Frei: Well actually, there are so many images that come to mind and so many sounds. But, I ​ remember meeting Barack Obama the first time when he was on book tour in New Hampshire, which is one of the whitest states in America. He gave a speech in a room, about the same size as this room- actually looking remarkably similar without the wonderful paintings and the works. It was absolutely jam packed, this is a book tour and there were three thousand people in and around this hall, and he was the only black face in the crowd. People were going nuts! And this was a book tour, you know of course it was the beginning of an unofficial campaign, but it was a book tour! He had a pile of books and he was signing them, and he gave a speech that was kind of the beginning of his ‘Stump’ speech. I remember this reporter from the local New Hampshire TV station, standing on one of the tables, with sort of Barack Obama right behind him, it was a slightly insalubrious shot actually because Obama’s face was literally underneath this man’s legs! Looking up! He was wearing a very ill-fitting jacket, and had a very large, sort of ice-cream shaped microphone, and literally couldn’t contain himself, he said: “I’ve never seen anything like this in my thirty five years of covering New Hampshire, and the Primaries and what’s going to happen here, this is unbelievable!” And then, you combine that reaction, and you know, the New Hampshire voters are like the biggest political snobs apart from perhaps the people of Iowa, they’ve seen everyone! You know, if G. W. Bush didn’t ring them at least six times, they weren’t interested! So, they know everything about politics, they expect full attention, and suddenly this guy turns up with a funny name and he looks different, and they’d all heard about him, and we’d all seen the speech in 2004, the Democratic Convention in Boston, but that was different. I mean a speech, even a very very good speech given in a setting like that is sort of partly what you expect, but you didn’t expect this. And also, there was no security, there was no one with him, he was completely on his own, and if you cover American politics, to see even a vaguely promising candidate travel totally by himself is astonishing. I mean here, I think every Council member in DC has at least four bodyguards! Anyway, so it was extraordinary, and you could talk to him, what’s more- soon after that the rings of security started to appear and hands always came out- and you know you could have a chat, and you could converse with him, and was just a funny, cool guy, you could have an interesting conversation with him- at least I thought it was interesting! You realised this man is going places, and I remember saying to my colleague from The Times of London “There’s the next President” and he said “Yeah I think that too, but is that really the case? Can we really say that?” Of course, it’s wonderful to remember these days now, because we’re all stuck in the rather ugly trench warfare of making it all work and I wonder if he actually looks back? I wonder if he saw your works today if he’d kind of linger quietly, and think ‘hmm...I remember that moment...that was fun...this isn’t much fun!’ and whether Michelle is saying “I told you so!”.

Alex Dimsdale: Nicola, is there a particular moment that stands out for you? You’ve obviously got ​ these seven gorgeous, sort of discret images, but is there a particular moment that you remember that really kind of summed up the campaign for you?

Nicola Green: I think there’s two things that really struck me visually, one is more general, that in the ​ news, and on the news, the images were often quite hysterical and very loud, there was a lot of noise, there was so much excitement, and there was so much kind of noise around this story. What I saw actually was, a quietness, and a stillness, and a kind of patience and this sense of kind of waiting for something. In that I kind of understood hope in a different way that was something quieter, which I tried to capture in that third image. So I think, when everybody was queing for these rallies, and in the moment at the end of his speech or whatever, there would be a lot of noise, but, beforehand, there was this quietness.

Matt Frei: You know that’s so true, I remember thinking that too. Because most political campaigns ​ you have all this incredible music, there’s always a country music band beforehand, not in Obama’s case of course, it would be a different kind of music, but it’s full of noise, and then the speech starts, and it’s the ‘Stump’ speech. But actually, with him it was the silence of the crowd, listening to what he was having to say, for the first time people were actually listening to a politician. Which is astonishing really. I mean, I’m sure your husband is being listened to all the time… without casting aspersions on this wonderful profession! But most campaigns people no longer listen, they all know what they’re supposed to do, they all know the applause lines, but here was a guy who was being listened to, which was interesting.

Alex Dimsdale: Do you think as a Brit you had a, do you think your Britishness sort of helped you ​ create these pieces that are very American? Did it give you an interesting outside perspective? Nicola Green: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know about specifically being British, but I think not being ​ American, absolutely made a big difference. To begin with I thought ‘hmm...I’m not American and this is an American Story’ but the minute I got on the plane after the first trip I made, I realised that I had this opportunity. On the plane I would have a kind of literal and metaphorical ability to kind of draw away and get perspective. Also, of course, I realised very quickly that not being American, I wasn’t invested in the same way in the outcome, it wouldn’t be my taxes that were going up or down, or you know. So, I had the ability to kind of separate myself, and i think that was really important, because I think it’s very hard to get perspective on such an extraordinary story as this, and I was able to do that partly by not being American. By leaving the country as well, and being able to go back to my studio and think about this, you know, I had to be disciplined to have that perspective still because everyone was still talking about him in the UK. In fact on that point, I made a very conscious decision right from the first trip I made, that I didn’t tell anybody that I was making these trips. So I didn’t discuss it with anybody apart from my husband and my parents, who were good enough to look after my children when I wasn’t there! Because I wanted to keep as much distance as I possibly could, and keep as much of the power of the experiences that I’d had in the work, and not kind of let it dissipate in just conversations and chat that it easily could’ve done.

Matt Frei: I think it’s interesting, we’re talking about him as an American president, but there was a ​ sort of global phenomenon there. I was in Berlin when he want on that trip, it was in July- and McCain was criticising him for his victory tour- and the fact that the people of Berlin, who are also a pretty cynical bunch, turned out, two hundred and fifty thousand of them, to see this presidential candidate. The last time that they did that was actually, the last time they turned out in such numbers for an American president, was for G.W.Bush, but not for him, they were against him, over the Iraq war. Before that it was John F. Kennedy, you know, and when John F. Kennedy died my mother actually gave birth to me two weeks early because she was in such shock! You know as a German, that this President who was on West Germany’s side, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, had kind of stuck up for the Germans who felt very threatened by what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain- you know, I popped out early! I remember doing this campaign, even the British public was so engaged with the minutiae of the Primaries, that I got a call from my Plumber in London saying “Gotta ring me cos there’s a leak in your house in Putney” and I called him up and said “What’s the matter?” and he said “Well it’s terrible, but what I really want talk about are these Super Delegates! Are they going to stop Barack Obama from becoming the next President!?” and I thought that’s amazing, not because he was Plumber, but for anyone in Britain to take any interest in the minutiae of this campaign. I think it’s interesting, I think what’s happening to some extent with Obama, is what happened with Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, where he became a lot more popular outside the country than inside the country, it’s not as dramatic as that, but you know, we saw when Obama went to visit London, in May, that the love affair is still there, the embers are still glowing, and sometimes here in this country you wonder if that’s still the case, even with people who support him. I mean, you know, you’re always more cynical about your own politicians. I was in New York yesterday for these occupy Wall Street protests, which are interesting in their own way, but I spoke to a lot of people who were out there knocking on doors on behalf of President Obama, candidate Obama, who will not be doing the same thing this time around.

Sarah E Lewis: And also, I mean, the solicitations that you receive reflect that, there’s a ​ consciousness of that. Though, I have so much to say about the global impact of this, I put myself in a position, having lived in the UK for those three plus years, of trying to understand the political system- I feel very empathic in that way, in trying to see what it was like for you to have done the same. And as a Curator, as an Art Historian, whose trained effectively to look at artistic intention as it’s materialised, and semiotics in works, I found that as soon as I got to sort of Day Two, in a way, of the campaign, and looked at this gesture of the fist, I realised OK, it’s clearly a non-American artist whose done this. In the sense that what’s beautiful about it is I, and I think many Americans, see that sign as so loaded, with so much that doesn’t have anything to do with the election…

Matt Frei: The fist bump, the famous fist bump… ​

Sarah E Lewis: ...Well that, but also I’m thinking about The Olympics, in terms of the Black Power ​ salute, which is the way it’s most associated here, and why the first bump was so effective, then translated onto the New Yorker cover, with the sort of turbaned Barack, and sort of magnum afroed Michelle, fist bumping each other, with guns slung over her shoulder and all the rest. So I looked at that and thought OK, this is now a gesture that can become more physical again, and not so politicised in that same way, and maybe can know its power, instead of a racial form of power, right? The way in which the series- well it doesn’t really end because as you mentioned its cyclical of course- but you see the way the outstretched hand has sort of religious connotations too, but also is a salute, and almost a thanks, and it’s the night of the culmination of this process. So I love the way in which your perspective allowed for a gesture to sort of become emptied out of some of the overweight or bloat that Americans have associated it with. You’re able to really use it as a way to look at this campaign anew and divorce it from one in particular figure and make it about us.

Alex Dimsdale: Sarah, I had a question about the tradition that this fits into, with your sort of curator ​ hat on, when I think about art that deals with social and political change, I normally think about satire, so Hogarth and Gillray in the UK. Or I think about the big, graphic posters of people with high cheekbones, that come from Communist China, Russia or Cuba. But the first one is meant to sort of make a social point, and perhaps poke fun, and the second is propaganda or intended to glorify, but this is neither. So, where does it fit in, in that tradition?

Sarah E Lewis: Well I think it’s important to sort of state from the start what propaganda typically is ​ right? Placing a maybe undue or overburden on one aspect of the fact of the matter in order to influence, and influence is sort of the key term there, this does none of that, and so it’s certainly separate from propaganda. Photojournalism, you know, there are ethics involved with the accuracy with the sheer design to show what’s in front of you, and it’s separate from that as well. Hogarth, and Gillray and satire, is I think very interesting, not, in a way I think will get us into a discussion about this. I mentioned earlier to a few of you that one of the forerunners for Barack Obama in this country, Frederick Douglass, the most photographed black man in America in the Nineteenth Century. Powerful orator, abolitionist obviously, really confused his audience on a number of occasions where he gave a very powerful speech called ‘Pictures and Progress’ in 1861 and 65, so bookending the Civil War. And he surprised his audience because it was supposed to be about the Civil War, you know, you’d go hear Frederick Douglass talk about that topic, but it’s actually about pictures and you’re confused. But, his argument was that Hogarth in particular, he singled out Hogarth’s work, and satire in general, had the ability to do this, his exact quote was: ‘It’s able to show life both as it is, and as it appears to be’. He was fascinated by the way in which the imagination is kind of activated by that contrast, and how progress can be affected by looking at the difference between the two, sometimes there’s a gulf between those two things, and you realise how much work you have to do, sometimes they’re close together. But that’s why he was interested in pictures in particular. So I think, what this work is also able to do for us is show us what hope, and I love your decontextualisation of hope, what it looks like, what it did look like at the beginning of a campaign, what it perhaps looked like at the end.

Nicola Green: And what it might mean for people in the future thinking back on this moment, ​ because it will be different for our children then it is for us, and how they might read it was absolutely in my mind as I was making this work. Because that’s really important, and that’s something that art can contribute very importantly to a conversation between now and the future and with future generations.

Matt Frei: It’s interesting isn’t it also, the most kind of enduring image, artistic image, of the ​ campaign is that famous poster, and I can’t think of another election that has produced, or any political campaign that has produced such an iconic image.

Sarah E Lewis: ...You mean the Shepard Fairey. ​

Matt Frei: That’s such an iconic image, and its derivative in some ways of course, but at the same ​ time you can only really produce that kind of image, and implant it in people’s mind, if the story of that campaign is particularly poignant in the way that this was. I can’t imagine that sort of poster being repeated, in some ways, people might remember what the campaign was originally about...

Nicola Green: Its repeated by… ​

Sarah E Lewis: By Shepard Fairey! ​

Nicola Green: No, but its repeated actually, it’s so iconic that every time somebody thinks of a ​ politician that’s going to be something they make the picture look like a Shepard Fairey of Obama.

Matt Frei: I can’t imagine the Mitt Romney poster being quite so....I can’t imagine Rick Perry taking ​ off the John Wayne pose, you had the wonderful one of Obama.

Alex Dimsdale: I was going to ask, you were talking about how when you were making this work you ​ were making it for future generations, and I was just wondering how your kind of personal history, as you’re married to this star, black, British politician, David Lammy, and you have two children, how did that feed into, that kind of personal identity, feed into your identity as an artist when you were making the works?

Nicola Green: Well, I think, for all of us our personal experience does shape what we think about ​ things, and how we respond to things. Actually, in relation to my husband, he for quite a long time, he was actually a lone voice in the Labour establishment in supporting Obama, because they were all supporting Clinton. Actually, at the time I started this work, it wasn’t a kind of mainstream subject, and it certainly wasn’t a subject that anybody thought was going to have a lot of traction or was going to end in the way that it did. I was interested in it as an artist for all the creative possibilities that the journey of exploring this story was going to take me on. In relation to my children, well I said at the beginning, as a mother you think very hard, about how your children are going to experience the world in a different way to you, and that’s very important to kind of think about. Wrapped up with my children looking different to me is identity, and portraiture is all about identity. I was very focused on thinking about that and the Twentieth Century is filled with, across the world, the story of racial equality, and actually, this moment, when Obama became President was a very proud Twenty First Century moment. In that moment, for my children, suddenly the landscape was transformed, because the world would see my children slightly differently, and the possibilities for them, and the expectations for them differently. That’s incredibly powerful, and that was absolutely with me as I was making this work, but of course, there are also lots of other themes in this work as well as that, but it was very important.

Alex Dimsdale: Also, I’m interested by the idea of you travelling with the campaign almost like a ​ photojournalist would, except looking for different things from what a journalist would look for, and it will be interesting to hear Matt’s take on this, and what he was kind of looking for because he was approaching it with a different eye, the picture that is on the front of the programmes you all have, which is a stunning photo you just took on a little camera…

Nicola Green: In fact I brought it, this is the camera that I took all the photos on… ​

Alex Dimsdale: Can you talk a bit about what you were kind of looking for? ​

Nicola Green: Well I consciously chose to take photos with this camera, because I wanted to be as ​ close to the subject as I possibly could, so in fact, on this occasion I was standing right next to his ankles. I took my sketchbooks and my pens and my pencils and I spent most of the time drawing because I wanted to kind of connect my self as much as I could to the subject matter, and to everybody around me. But I used my camera as well, and I wanted to have as little between me and everything around me as I possibly could, which is why I chose such a small camera, because I didn’t want there to be a big distance, because I specifically didn’t want to focus too much on the outcome of the individual photograph because I was really concerned with trying to get inside what I was searching for. So, what I do as an artist, which is to look for the gestures, and the stances, and the moments that kind of contain the essence of either the individual, or what is going on around them, or their story, or all these other sub-themes. In the moment that I took that photograph, I’d been really searching for something in Obama that I was finding very difficult to get a hold of in my drawings and in my thoughts, which was something contained in the way that he used gesture as a kind of sign language, and how he held himself that portrayed not only this power, but this sense of change and this sense of journey. Actually, when I took that photograph, I felt like I’ve actually got something there that I was searching for.

Sarah E Lewis: I found it so fascinating, you mentioned, I think it was in an interview, one of the ​ many different articles that’s come out about this body of work, that you couldn’t quite capture his gait, you know, his walk. As an African-American, a black American, I think this was one of those moments where you start to see something you never think you would, ever, in generations to come, this kind of swagger, that is very much a part of the black way, and to a certain degree, something that he employed as a presidential sort of move to convey power too. So, when I saw that comment, I thought well of course you can’t capture that, how can you capture it in print? But in this photograph that’s on the cover you manage to, something about the way his arms are sort of slightly out to the side, he’s framed by the buildings, you’re able to really show what that dynamism looks like.

Nicola Green: Yeah, and of course, if I were a journalist, I would’ve been on the rack, you go up high ​ on a rack in order that your viewpoint is head to head, not standing right below your subject or at some strange angle. So I was standing in a completely different place, but also as a journalist you’re thinking very much about the next day’s newspapers, and how this might be the cover of a magazine or a paper, or how its going to attend to the story. Whereas I was looking for, what you were describing, something completely different. So, I also was looking at his whole body, in terms of most of the photos taken of powerful people, actually, it tends to just be the head and shoulders.

Sarah E Lewis: A classical bust. ​

Matt Frei: I have to say as a journalist, there is so much that they want you to see, that you’re always ​ trying to see something slightly differently, and I would’ve been right there with you, trying to look up at him. Looking up at his double chin, which I’m sure he has! Because the point is this, that, and especially with him, he is such an actor, and I don’t mean that in a negative sense, but he knows how to perform, and he does it very naturally, that you’re trying to capture, you’re always trying to get at some nugget of truth, and I’m not saying that in the investigative sense, but something real, that is not scripted and is not artificial. Every White House is more scripted and artificial than the previous White House. With the Clinton White House, it was the first one that I covered. I wasn’t based there at the time, but I covered it on a few occasions, it was slightly ragged at the edges and it was the way that Clinton was as a President, you know he’d stay up too late doing whatever, having too many take-out pizzas, and it was just slightly shambolic. The Bush White House was incredibly disciplined, in terms of the image, if the President turned up somewhere, Bush gave a speech at Mount Rushmore, they literally spent a day making sure that the camera angle from the platform would put his head right next to Lincoln’s on the rock. It was very very carefully done. Obama the same thing, the Denver convention, the first time that you went there, was an incredibly choreographed, scripted event, I mean ridiculous I think in some ways. You know, the Doric columns, the recreation of the West Wing on the stage, it was absurd! So what you try and get as a journalist is, you try and get, either in his body language or his gait, that kind of swagger come almost levitating at times, the walk is really important, and you can’t change that, you can’t fake the walk. Now when he speaks, he’s got this way of his chin moving up, so as a photojournalist, as a TV guy which is what I am, you can use those pictures, you hope that you have a cameraman who captures that image, and then you spot it, and you write to it, you use it because it tells you something. Bush was different, Bush was all, he had ants in his pants, and in his shoulders, he was constantly moving, he was shrugging involuntarily all the time, and he was much less controlled as a politician. It will be interesting to see what happens with the next bunch. It all about how you comport yourself, and you’re always in the public light, and you know when you’re tired. It’s interesting you know, you contrast the picture of Obama which we have in our mind which is from the poster, endless speeches, it’s always the same sort of image. Then you look at that picture of him, the still photograph of him, in the situation room, watching Osama Bin Laden live, getting captured, and then killed, and he’s sitting at the back, he’s not at the head of the table, and he’s like a school boy ‘please let this go right, because if it doesn’t I’m toast’ looking up, and his crouched, in the fetal position almost, he’s really really worried that this thing is going to go wrong. It was amazing that they released that picture actually, and if it had gone wrong, they probably wouldn’t have done.

Audience Q&A

Question 1: Fantastic conversation thus far, my name’s Helen, and I think one of the most ​ interesting parts of the prints, this is sort of directed to everyone so it’s just a general question, it’s the narrative of the whole thing, and how we’re looking a three images right now if we’re facing forward, but actually it goes from one all the way through seven, and that’s a really important part of what’s happening, so I guess first Nicola, but also to Sarah were you were talking about Hogarth and thinking about some of his modern moral tales and trying to instill these values, I was wondering Nicola if you could talk a bit about the underlying narrative, one print relates to the next and your decision to use gesture, the most powerful mode of communication, and how that plays into what we’re looking at right now.

Nicola Green: Well I think, I was very interested in how Obama used his hands, you know he moves ​ with his hands all the time, and this kind of sense of communicating across the world, using sign language, because everyone focused a lot on his oratory, but actually the way that he moved and used his hands, and I kind of focused on this sort of sign language. Actually, the subtleties of that were very impressive and interesting. What I did in terms of the seven images, and the narrative of those, in telling this story, I went back to the narrative that it is used for most films and stories that have ever been written, which is what has to happen for the story to begin. So this is actually, in a literal sense, my response to Denver, where there were seventy thousand people in an open air stadium do a wave before he came on and this is everybody’s hands who were in that stadium. But also, its all of us across the world coming together in this moment, this is called Light. The second ​ ​ day is called Struggle, so this is the history and what’s gone before, for him personally, but also in ​ ​ history. I did this drawing when I went to a rally in New Hampshire, and it was at the height of the kind of difficult point in the campaign, and it was definitely not the glamorous side of the campaign that I went to in Concord, New Hampshire. In a narrative sense, Day 3, is the characters, and this is my tribute to the American people. Day 4 is him and this journey that he’s on, and thinking about that. Day 5, which is just behind this pillar, which is the image of the press, is partly what he sees, I wanted to do an image that was what he sees all the time, which is a kind of sea of one-eyed cyclops, which is actually quite scary.

Matt Frei: Thanks! ​

Nicola Green: But also, in terms of when you’re looking at these, it’s kind of turning the camera back ​ on us, the viewer. Our part in this process, and in this story. The next one is called Sacrifice/Embrace ​ and this was an image taken from election night, where he was embracing Grant Park, but also the world in that moment. And the final image is inauguration when he makes that gesture on behalf of everybody, people who haven’t voted for him in America, and people who didn’t vote at all, and he makes that gesture. I looked at that gesture, and how presidents have all used that gesture slightly differently, a tiny little subtle change can change the reading of that gesture. But that gesture (Day 7) refers back to this one (Day One). It’s a cycle, and the story, doesn’t finish there, we have to pick it up again.

Sarah E Lewis: The cyclical nature of it is really important to highlight. Let me just add that, I bought ​ up Douglass, in part, well, just in terms of history, I’m not sure if everyone recalls that he was going to run for Congress in 1854, and the response to that of course, is what made him decide not to, but it was in that speech that he said something just apropos of this particular body of work, he said ‘in US politics it’s the political gallery that begins the operation of election, but the picture gallery is what ends it’ I think that that’s very much what you see here. What ends it in terms of how we envision this process is, can only be captured by, its been distilled, through these gestures, through symbols and things of that nature.

Question 2: I just wondered if you could describe a little bit, which you have to me from time-to- ​ time, what was the attitude of the entourage towards you, and towards having an artist in the midst of this whole, huge, political turmoil. Both the political entourage and the journalists. How did you kind of explain what you were doing? I think it’s fairly unusual to have an artist travelling with the campaign.

Nicola Green: Well I wasn’t exactly travelling, I mean I made these trips, I would go to certain ​ events, then I would go back to the UK. But, to be honest, the conversations I had with people, staffers and journalists on the campaign were all incredibly interesting. But, certainly the campaign team didn’t have time for me because they have far more things on their mind, and I wasn’t there as somebody to contribute in that moment. I really felt that I was there witnessing what was going on and taking it home back to my studio to think about there really. I think the way American elections are run, it’s hard to go to more than one event, so it was a huge privilege for me to go to more than one event on this campaign. I was very aware that as an artist I would be having a completely different viewpoint. I don’t know that anybody else was thinking about what I was doing, you’d have to ask them!

Question 3: I’m wondering if you could talk briefly about the title, and how you chose those words ​ which have a lot of really important connotations, and the number of images out of the clearly huge number that you had to work with.

Nicola Green: Well I just wanted to distill it down into a number of images that could be readable ​ without it being an enormous book. And, you know, there’s seven days in a week, and I think that was my starting point. I actually made six trips, but I wanted a cycle that, well, it's got lots of connotations obviously, seven days, a huge amount, and in some ways I’d rather people take from that what they would like to take actually.

Sarah E Lewis: The illusion to the biblical nature of it, and I think the recoil that some people had ​ over the Messiah like treatment of Obama, was something that I thought was a nice double entendre.

Question 4: I wonder if you could talk about your selection and use of colour, when I think of the ​ elections in this country, Presidential elections, there’s this often gaudy over-predominance of red, white and blue, and this is conspicuously absent, and your colour is quite beautiful and I just wondered if you could tell us where that came from?

Nicola Green: There is a little bit of red, white and blue in the hat in that image. I thought very very ​ long and hard about the colour, colour is a huge part of my work, so the colours have a lot of kind of layers to them, actually. They have emotional layers for me, they have process, in terms of when I was making the work, all these different works you can see in the book, kind of exploring how colour can tell the story in a slightly different way. Once I’d worked out which colour to use for each image, I then worked incredibly hard on getting the colour exactly how I wanted it, that took a lot of time and many attempts. I worked in the end on these prints in three different print workshops, actually, before I got to Brooklyn. Each time it was slightly different and I kind of moved it on to get, you know, in that final one, that orange really kind of popping and bright. I guess I could talk about the colour in each of them individually, I’ll talk about that orange. I wanted to use a colour that is about acceptance and inclusion, which is what I felt that moment was about. I had also thought very very hard about you represent skin colour with paint colour, and actually, Andy Warhol used Orange in all those prints he did of Muhammad Ali. I thought a lot about what colours are contained in orange, because it’s not actually just red and yellow, and it certainly isn’t just red and yellow in the oranges that I used. So I was thinking about how to denote colour, using colour.

Question 5: I was wondering, have you considered covering another campaign in England maybe? ​ Another one in the states? I don’t know Sarah Palin? Who knows!

Nicola Green: Well, I absolutely haven’t ruled out another campaign in America. But I think it would ​ be very hard for me to, going back to being not American in this campaign, I think it would be very very hard for me to cover a campaign in Britain, I think it would be too close actually. I think it would be very hard to get the perspective I got on this. It would end up being - not that this isn’t a personal journey I went on- but I think I would have great difficulty having any distance. So I wouldn’t attempt it actually, I wouldn’t want to attempt it.

Question 6: My name is Kirk Hanlin, and I have a little bit of a different perspective then all of you, in ​ that I served for eight years in the Clinton White House, as the special assistant to the President, and I was the guy in charge of- six months ahead of time- figuring out that picture that you had to look at! But the work to me is amazing because when you work in a White House, and my first Presidential campaign was Walter Mondale, and I worked them all since. Part of my job was to think through those images, and to see the very different perspective that an artist brings to looking at them, and the power of these because for politicians, the fact that Nicola captured hand motions. Politicians are very aware of the power of the difference of if you go like this (points), and the difference if you ​ ​ go like this (waves), or you know, pointing forward into the future. Politicians are very aware of those ​ ​ things, most people are not, and an artist that can actually capture those moments is pretty amazing. Also from a historical perspective, if you think about whether by divine providence or luck, Nicola, at least for the six trips, and actually probably five that she came on, New Hampshire was where President Obama learnt that it was not going to be easy, it was not all going to be Iowa and off we go to win this thing, a landslide, Hillary Clinton was going to fight all the way through. But then, she was there in Denver when he got the nomination, she was there on election night when he won the election, she was there for the inauguration to see that happen, and she was also in Philadelphia, where I happened to run into Nicola. The day that she happened to go to Philadelphia was a very unique day in Presidential politics in this country, and especially for President Obama because the Pennsylvania Primary was a pivotal Primary in his campaign, there practically was no map to the White House for the Republicans, if you looked at the Electoral College, that did not include Pennsylvania. They claimed to have some scenarios, but truthly there was no scenario without Pennsylvania. Governor Rendell, Mayor Nutter, the Senator from Pennsylvania, had all talked to the Obama campaign about the fact that if you want to win Pennsylvania, you have to win Philadelphia in overwhelming numbers. They said in order to win Philadelphia you can’t do it like other states, because typically what Obama would do is come in and have a huge rally, it would be the big story that a hundred thousand people showed up. What they said was that in Philadelphia you have four very distinct neighbourhoods that self-identify, if you ask them to come to you, they’re insulted because Philadelphia people and you should come to there neighbourhood. President Obama got it, and he agreed, and believe me to get a politician to agree to this is very difficult, he agreed to do four rallies, all of which had over twenty thousand people in five hours. So the first rally was actually going to be at 7 AM, now you think about that, that meant secret service opened the doors at 5 AM, people got in line at 2 AM. When I look at that picture right there, I can remember people, I got a page at one o’clock in the morning that people were in sleeping bags outside of the gate and people all night long, were standing there to go in so that they could be there. Which meant that at 5 AM twenty thousand people decided to go through metal detectors to go to this rally. And it was four separate feelings, so from the perspective of pictures, I was very cognizant, because I was in charge that day, of how do you convey through the media in Pennsylvania, the four iconic images of that city, that would drive home that point. Nothing is as powerful as that one image there, of the people patiently waiting in line, because for all four of these events they had to patiently wait in line.

Alex Dimsdale: Is your question about what was it that was so compelling that made these people ​ wait in line? It’s about the sort of narrative, what was the personal story that Matt was talking about earlier? Matt do you have any thoughts on what that would be?

Matt Frei: I just want to know this guy, I want your number! Next time! ​

Question 6 continued: My final point was that her ability to be there, at those pivotal moments in ​ that campaign, at the end of that day, those same politicians told, then Senator, Obama there was no way he was going to lose Pennsylvania, in fact the polling numbers after that day, it was over, which meant truthly the election was over after that day. She was there for that, she was there for all those important things. I mean, I’m sitting here looking at these pieces, I think the fact that she managed to be there for such pivotal moments actually played into the work that we have in front of us. It’s just amazing!

Question 7: I was wondering, if you had to pick an image for what’s going to happen in this ​ campaign season, the Republicans and the Democrats, whether there’d be an image that you could conjure from what we’ve seen already? Or what we’re going to see? This is for all of you, what do you think would sum up this election campaign?

Nicola Green: Well for me the story is not over yet, so I don’t think I could answer that, not yet! ​

Matt Frei: No, it’s barely begun, for the Democrats, I think the big story will be how to recreate the ​ kind of magic that we saw three years ago, that did actually briefly unite the country, I’m sure there are people that think a lot of what we said tonight is absolute guff, who think that seven days over one politician called Barack Obama is ridiculous. But, I remember a lot of people who would not have voted for a candidate like that, staunch Republicans, voting for him, because they didn’t like the idea of Sarah Palin possibly running the country after Lehman Brothers collapsed, partly because he was a black politician that made white people feel comfortable, Al Sharpton would not have done that, or Jesse Jackson, and Barack Obama did manage to do that- but that’s a whole nother discussion, all sorts of things that we haven’t got time to get in to. So I think for the Democrats this time it will be how to recreate, after all that’s happened in the last three years, some of that magic, without coming across as tawdry, or false, or just nostalgic, unrealistic. A lot of stuff has gone down, none of it particularly attractive, a lot of it he is blamed for, a lot of it he shouldn’t be blamed for. But how do you make people forget some of those things and get to vote for you again? How do you enthuse your base to come out and knock on doors? I’m not so hopeful on that front. As far as the Republicans are concerned, at the moment, it’s like a combination of the X-Factor, American Idol, and, I mean there’s some really good candidates there, don’t get me wrong, but I think the confusion of those candidates. It’s like sort of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, in the kind of developing stage, they’ve got these crazy flavours and it’s not quite right yet and they’re still looking. That’s the confusion within the Republican ranks, they’re not sure if they’re the old Republican Party, the GOP, the Grand Old Party of grand old men, or the Tea Party, is it something in between? What’s interesting for me as an outsider who’s lived here for a relatively long time is, I think this country is going through an enormous period of self-doubt, and self-questioning, and in a sense the Republican array of candidates at the moment, in all its messiness, silliness to some extent, reflects that this country doesn’t really know where it wants to head, where it can head. America has had limitations, has been reminded of it’s limitations on just about every level, and this country doesn’t do limitations terribly well, and I mean that in a positive sense! I like that, I’m German by birth and I grew in Britain, limitations is what we’re all about! People talk about the German dream, you head for the door! People talk about the British dream it conjures up horrible images of boarding school! So basically, America still has a political vocabulary, and a level of rhetoric, which I think most Europeans, when its gels, find rather impressive and inspiring. I think that’s why, you say you get the perspective of an outsider, which I think you clearly do, because well you’re an outsider, but also a lot of the images, especially the fist, are very politically charged and you would have probably thought twice about that where you an American. But I think Obama was a very personal story, whether you were living here, or Berlin, or in London, everyone was basically asking themselves the next day, after election day, could we have done the same thing? And the answer, on the whole, was no.