Capturing history in the middle of a mob

By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences

We cover stories that move the world; on Wednesday afternoon, we found ourselves scrambling to cover something unfolding in our own backyard.

National Geographic photographer Louie Palu has worked the forever war in Afghanistan, the deadly drug conflicts of Mexico, and the Arctic Cold War. For the last few months, he has been documenting the 2020 election and its aftermath—against the backdrop of a global pandemic.

So on Wednesday, he found himself inside the Capitol (above), preserving for history the actions of a mob trying to stop America’s transfer of power.

Trying to survive in a crowd openly hostile to journalists, Louie remembered lessons from covering other conflicts—find a pillar to protect you from gunfire (shown, above and below), and always know a way out. “I was afraid of the crowd turning on me,” Louie tells us. “I was right in the middle of an out of control, violent group.”

Louie had been a recent regular to the Capitol, but on Wednesday, “I watched the police who I see everyday on the Hill become totally overrun by a wave of people determined to destroy an imagined enemy.”

His full video tells the rest of the story, writes our editor in chief, Susan Goldberg. In the video, Louie shows a mob so out of control that words alone cannot adequately describe it. Louie worried he might be badly injured, or lose his camera. After so much pepper spray and tear gas, he had to pull back (below, Louie wiping his eyes).

The morning after the Capitol siege, Louie texted a colleague. He had barely slept all night, so he’d had time to reflect. “I realize,” he wrote, that “I personally witnessed one of the saddest days I had ever felt in America.”

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

This just in: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says Congress will proceed with impeachment unless President Donald Trump resigns immediately after the insurrection at the Capitol. Nat Geo's Erin Blakemore has this timely explainer on how a second inauguration effort would work.

The toll: A Capitol Police officer died last night from injuries in Wednesday's fighting, and a federal murder investigation is opening, CNN reports. Fifty-six members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police were injured, including one dragged into the mob and repeatedly beaten and tazed, Police Chief Robert Contee told a news conference. The Washington Post reported that a Trump appointee in the Pentagon hindered efforts by the D.C. National Guard to buttress the overwhelmed Capitol Police. In Pentagon memos the two days before the insurrection, the Guard was denied ammo and riot gear, prevented from most interactions with rioters, and stopped from sharing equipment with local law enforcement without a Trump appointee's approval.

Unprecedented? The Capitol attack, sadly, is not unique in one sense, historians tell us. “It represents something deeply rooted in the American experience, which is actually hostility to democracy,” says Columbia University’s Eric Foner, an expert in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Specifically, he is referring to the hostility that he and other historians link to the country’s fraught history of racial suppression.

Speaking of which: People who supported the summertime protests against police brutality noted a stark difference in handling the overwhelmingly white pro-Trump mob on Wednesday with the aggressive police efforts against Black Lives Matter protesters. “Observers were appalled by what they describe as the glaring disparity,” DeNeen Brown writes for Nat Geo.

The proper comparison: Stop saying Wednesday’s insurrection was like something from a third world country. That’s the plea from Beirut-based Nat Geo correspondent Rania Abouzeid, who has covered instability for decades. The rest of the world regards that as an American sign of denial, she writes. “In other places where protesters rebel, storm, and vandalize state property, their governance systems and leaders aren’t generally regarded—either by themselves or by others—as beacons of democracy.”

NEWS FROM THE VISUAL WORLD

Copyright: 2021 may look different for photographers, with a new copyright bill signed into law in the waning days of the Trump administration. The act establishes a copyright small claims system to help collect compensation from those who misuse a creator’s work, PetaPixel reports. The system will allow creators to file suit in a venue more accessible than U.S. federal court.

The power of a photograph: At 17, straight-A student Mimi Jones was charged with “deliberate disturbance of the peace,” “malicious trespassing” and “conspiracy.” Why? Jones, in June 1964 in racially divided St. Augustine, Florida, swam in a hotel pool while Black. The photographs of Jones’s splash rippled nationwide, captured in front pages of America’s newspapers and furthering the cause of desegregation. Jones was one of a group of pioneers who died last year who were memorialized in a year-end New York Times story.

Longest exposure: In 2012, a grad student created a pinhole camera using a beer can lined with photographic paper—and put it atop a telescope in the British school’s observatory. Then she forgot about it. Late last year, an employee found it—with an image that had an exposure that lasted eight years (pictured above). “It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched,” the then-grad student, Regina Valkenborgh, told the school. Valkenborgh is now a photography technician.

Arrested while working: Award-winning photographer Abul Kalam was photographing the controversial transfer of refugees from Myanmar to a remote island camp in Bangladesh when he was detained last week. Human rights activists and journalists, including Bianca Jagger, called for his release, the Guardian reports. The activist groups say the refugees, who fled ethnic cleansing in their homeland, are either being bribed or intimidated into moving to the remote island.

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On Mondays, Debra Adams Simmons covers the latest in history. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up here to also get Victoria Jaggard on science, George Stone on travel, and Rachael Bale on animal and wildlife news.

THE LAST GLIMPSE

Home on the range: Over the years, photographer Jim Richardson has traveled widely, but he’s often returned to the open fields of his home state of Kansas. This image, taken on assignment for a 2007 National Geographic article, shows bison grazing in the Flint Hills at the Konza Prairie near Manhattan, Kansas. The image was not chosen for the magazine article, but it stood out to our senior photo archivist, Sara Manco. “As a fellow Kansan, I love his ability to portray the beauty of the state which is often unknown and overlooked,” Sara tells us. Like bison? We’ve got a collection of our best bison images right here.

SEE THE BISON