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An image by Alan Chin from the New Hampshire primary season. © Alan Chin

I’ve been collaborating with Michael for a number of years. Initially it was because he had picked up an image of mine that was in the New York Times while I was freelancing for them in Iraq. One day I had Googled myself and I saw [my photo] was on this blog. I saw his commenters were reading all these things into it and I wrote in and said, I’m the photographer and I want to answer some of your questions. I was very factual, just to give more context. Of course no one had done that before. It started this whole interesting conversation online. Somehow in the process Michael was like, I’m really interested in hearing what you have to say and I would love to hear some more.

And in the next few years, any time I did something that I thought was interesting, after it was published or if I couldn’t get it published, I would send him a picture to let him run it on the blog. I figured, if it’s already been published or it’s not getting published, then what do I have to lose. I might as well have it be seen and talked about rather than just sitting on my hard drive.

Then when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama officially announced their candidacies, both of them did trips in New Hampshire and I decided to go up and shoot that. And I’m not a political junkie; I’m not a Washington photographer. I’m not very well experienced in this, I’ve never been in the bubble, but I thought this was obviously a really important time. So I sent Michael pictures from that because I couldn’t get them published. And he loved it, and the audience of the site loved it. And basically he committed, he said, look, you’re having a problem getting assignments. How about I pay at least a little bit, so at least you don’t go broke doing this, at least you can afford to put gas in your car, and you can cover some of these primaries for me.

Supporters at an Obama rally in Ohio during the primaries. © Alan Chin

So when the New Hampshire primary came in January this year, I did it for him. And then I did the Ohio primary. And Michael got really into it. He felt it was adding something to his mission on the BAG, which is a political blog about analyzing photography. He felt that by having his own photographer in a sense he could see things he wasn’t seeing from Getty or AP or whoever. Which is, of course, why anyone assigns anyone. And I kind of pointed this out to him. I said you’re becoming the same as any other editor and any other institution. Because the minute you’ve actually committed money, even if it’s not much, me as a photographer, I have an assignment. It’s the same thing, whether it’s Time magazine or BAGnewsNotes, all of a sudden, I need to do my best to deliver something that’s worth him paying for. It’s that simple.

It was kind of a revelation for both of us. Of course Michael had never seen himself as an editor or publisher. Bloggers think they’re against the main stream media. But in a sense we’ve become it. Because whenever we try to do anything like this, you actually become that which you oppose and that which you disagreed with because you just think you can do it better. And that’s what we think: We think we can do this better than the New York Times. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. Why do you bother going to press with something? Because you think you have something no one else has or you have a new way of looking at it. So we started rolling with that. And Michael was so pleased with what we were able to do, and traffic on the site was increasing. And the quality of what we were doing was very high. We were trying to get a little under the bubble of what they present to you, because it’s so packaged. So for the Democratic National Convention he really felt this was something we needed to do something on.