Hoping to catch a glimpse | Scene Through the Lens

As we’re 50 days into 2024 already, it’s a little late for New Year’s resolutions, so I won’t call it that. But my featured image this week does mark a resolution of sorts and a change, so I’ll explain.

A few years ago I starting walking every morning in my town for exercise. Over time, the routine strolls became more than just physical exercise, as I started posting smartphone pictures on my social media of things I’d see, as motivation. They became an exercise in visualization as well.

Last fall I felt I was spending too much time exercising the creative part at the expense of boosting my cardiovascular fitness. I was stopping too many times to smell too many roses. So I slowed down the picture-taking and picked up my pace. (I do still take some pictures - when they call out to me.)

I did resolve to start the new year off by finding a new way to continue to exercise the visualization.

I was struggling to find a new inspiration, when I ended up a few hours early this month at the Capitol in Harrisburg for Gov. Josh Shapiro’s second budget address.

I photographed the Capitol rotunda, in front of the grand staircase where the governor would later stand before a joint session of the legislature, assembled there because the usual space, the House chamber, was undergoing repairs from a water leak.

I knew the photo of the empty space - beautiful as I thought is was - would be rendered moot as a news photo once the 300-some members of General Assembly, their guests, and the governor arrived.

Fortunately, last week my editor saw the value of the older image and our arts editor had the idea to annotate all the elements and features of the Joseph Miller Huston-designed Capitol that President Theodore Roosevelt called “the handsomest building” he had ever seen.

Another image I made that morning while wandering in the building was used in color in this space last week. But it is the black-and-white version of the photo (below) that has me a new visual motivation for 2024.

This will be an exciting year in politics, so while covering the news of our democracy, government and the presidential election, inspired by the idiosyncratic eye of one of my all time favorite photographers, Stephen Crowley who worked for a quarter century at The New York Times based in Washington, D.C., for the rest of the year I’ll be looking behind the scene for images that are more than just people at podiums.

Politics has been one of my favorite assignments over the years. Once I saw Crowley’s work I have aimed to achieve something close to what his editors said when he retired, that his “incisive and revealing photographs pierced the public veneer of Washington politics, bringing the viewer into the back rooms of power.”

And in homage to Stephen (he preferred B&W photos) and in a personal homage to the Tri-X I used back in the days of my first presidential campaigns I will be posting some of those photos on social media in B&W (and a few in this space).

That’s why the photo of Mr. Freeman - who posts as REELZ6324 - featured at the top of the column this week is in B&W (the color version will appear below next week).

I was not working Saturday, but had my camera as I walked to Reading Terminal Market in the afternoon. When I saw all the backed-up traffic and police cruisers blocking some of the streets around the nearby Convention Center I remembered former President Trump had announced on social media that he would be speaking at Sneaker Con Philadelphia, the convention now in its 15th year, that bills itself as showcasing the “sickest kicks and the coolest streetwear.”

I joined the handful of supporters waiting in the windy cold on a corner on the edge of Chinatown for a glimpse of the Republican presidential candidate’s motorcade as he swung by for a 15-minute appearance at the event to unveil his line of gold sneakers.

Trump frequently attacks Philadelphia in his speeches, holding it up as a model of Democratic failure. During the 2020 campaign, he inspired T-shirts here when he said on a debate stage in Cleveland that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

The shoes, called “The Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker,” sell for $399 and sold out hours after their launch Saturday.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: