Madison was talking about whether America should restrict voting rights to property owners—but he might as well have been debating ballot selfies.

Ever since Americans began carrying smartphones with cameras, we’ve been posting photos of our ballots on social media. The so-called ballot selfie—which is not an actual selfie but typically a photo of a completed ballot—is now nearly as ubiquitous on voting day as those omnipresent stickers. It is how a great many Americans, millennials especially, convey their choice for elected office, share their voting enthusiasm, and implore their friends to follow suit.

And, in at least 25 states, it is illegal.

This widespread criminalization of ballot selfies occurred in state legislatures over many years with relatively little debate; some states simply extended existing bans on voting booth photography to cover the new genre. But the issue shot to prominence in 2014 when New Hampshire began investigating three voters who posted ballot selfies in violation of a state law that bars voters from “taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media or by any other means.” (One voter uploaded a picture of his Republican primary ballot to Facebook with the caption: “Because all of the candidates SUCK, I did a write-in of Akira,” his recently deceased dog.) Facing impending prosecution, the voters fought back in federal court, arguing that the New Hampshire statute violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

In August 2015, the voters won a total victory in a strongly worded opinion by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, a George H.W. Bush appointee. Barbadoro reasoned that the New Hampshire law was a “content-based restriction on speech because it requires regulators to examine the content of the speech to determine whether it includes impermissible subject matter.” And according to the Supreme Court, when a speech regulation “target[s] speech based on its communicative content,” courts must subject it to strict scrutiny—meaning it must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest.

Barbadoro found that the New Hampshire law satisfied neither prong. First, he challenged the state’s argument that the law furthered the “compelling government interest” of preventing vote-buying. New Hampshire hypothesized that vote-buyers might demand ballot selfies to ensure their money was well-spent but could not find an iota of evidence that this method of vote-purchasing actually occurred, making the threat too abstract to satisfy strict scrutiny: “For an interest to be sufficiently compelling,” the judge wrote, “the state must demonstrate that it addresses an actual problem.” Second, Barbadoro found that the law was far too broad to be narrowly tailored. “When content-based speech restrictions target vast amounts of protected political speech in an effort to address a tiny subset of speech that presents a problem,” he wrote, “the speech restriction simply cannot stand if other less restrictive alternatives exist.”

Just two months later, a federal judge in Indiana reached an identical conclusion in striking down that state’s ballot selfie ban. With some alarm, the judge noted that Indiana had criminalized political expression—thereby violating a bedrock principle of the First Amendment—in order to address an apparently nonexistent problem. Since then, New Hampshire has appealed Barbadaro’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The judges’ palpable skepticism at oral arguments in September suggests the state is poised to lose unanimously.

Absent evidence of vote-buying, these ballot selfie bans do seem to be overreactions—possibly well-intentioned regulations that nevertheless foster perilous political censorship. Expressing joy or anger about an election is core political speech—where, the Supreme Court has noted, “the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith.” New Hampshire and 24 other states seek to suppress a mode of communication beloved by young voters with no justification other than abstract concerns over a phantom threat. The ballot selfie may be emphatically modern, but ballot selfie bans look a lot like old-fashioned censorship.

Not every election law expert agrees. Writing in Reuters, Richard Hasen insists that ballot selfies are a “threat to democracy.” Hasen asserts that vote-buying “is a real—not theoretical—problem,” and that banning ballot selfies is a narrowly tailored way to combat it. A ballot photo, he writes, “is unique in being able to prove how someone voted.” Hasen even speculates that the reason vote-buying is so rare is because of laws like New Hampshire’s. Quoting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a decidedly different context, Hasen proclaims that repealing ballot selfie bans because vote-buying doesn’t occur “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

There are three problems with Hasen’s analysis. First, ballot selfies don’t irrefutably “prove how someone voted”; as election law attorney Daniel Horwitz has explained, voters using both paper and electronic ballots could almost always change their votes after snapping a photo. Second, the (still relatively rare) instances of voter fraud to which Hasen alludes likely would not have been foiled by a ballot selfie ban. Vote-buying almost always occurs through mail-in absentee ballots, not at the polls. Yet some ballot selfie bans only proscribe photographs inside the voting booth. And even broadly written bans would surely fail to stop absentee ballot–buying. If you’re selling a ballot that you fill out in the privacy of your home, you could easily prove your vote by other means—like showing it to a vote-buyer in person. (Why would you want to tout your purchased ballot on social media, anyway? That’s the least private way to prove how you voted.)

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hasen doesn’t seem to recognize the immense value that young voters today place on ballot selfies. Millennials use ballot selfies to convey information about their political views and engage with their friends about elections, to broadcast their personal ideologies, and share excitement about voting. (And they may foster more voting: One study suggests that Facebook users are more likely to vote when their friends reveal on social media that they have voted.) No matter how many states ban them, they will remain pervasive on Election Day, a key mode of political expression for the younger set. At this point, nothing short of a heavy-handed government crackdown can reverse that. The question, then, isn’t whether states should stop ballot selfies, because they can’t. The question is whether states should dangle the threat of prosecution over voters who dare to share a picture of their ballots, chilling speech and stifling political passions.

James Madison never wrote anything about smartphones. But it’s not hard to guess where he would’ve come down on ballot selfie bans. The founding father may have called election regulation “a task of peculiar delicacy,” but his view on free speech was simpler: It shall not be abridged. For better or worse, ballot selfies have become a fundamental mode of political speech in America. The First Amendment is clear here: Let the voters Snapchat.

The post I’ll Vote, But First, Let Me Take A Selfie appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But alongside this work—now preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as “Portraits of a City: The Scurlock Photographic Studio’s Legacy to Washington, D.C.”—are the family’s abundant but lesser-known images of schoolchildren.

These are exquisitely posed demonstrations of the promise of the next generation, a generation—theoretically anyway—less burdened by and beholden to a heavy, harmful past. Children with more freedom, to think and learn and acquire a good education.

The Scurlocks endeavored to portray the subjects of all of their work in the most flattering light, dressed in Sunday finery or their Lindy Hop best. They showcased the best examples in the display window of their U Street studio. To make it into the window became a substantiation of success.

As author and journalist Wil Haygood put it: “The style of their work—refined, dignified and poised—became known as ‘the Scurlock look.’ It said a lot of things, chief among them that classiness is swell and uplift gets rewarded.”

To create and sustain this view took a deep commitment, one handed down from father to sons. In a 2003 interview, Robert Scurlock described his father as “very intense, in all of his endeavors.” And so for more than six decades the Scurlocks documented, collected, and shared an idealized beauty, and in that act declared that this, too, was a part of the story of black America worth knowing and telling.

This mission presented a particular challenge when it came to portraying the schoolchildren of Washington D.C., where the educational inequities that scourged the nation emerged in a particular way. Unlike anywhere else in the country, public school teachers were employees of the federal government, and so they were paid the same regardless of skin color. The District was also home to the nation’s first public high school for non-white students, named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose own literary career, as one of the first nationally recognized black poets, was launched during his years attending an all-white high school.

And yet, the ugliness of segregation and the hardships that it wrought persisted—a school desegregation case from Washington D.C. was one of five from around the country that were combined into Brown v. Board of Education.

But in the Scurlock photos of schoolchildren, the “Scurlock look” is in full effect, in scenes carefully posed to evince the high-minded activities underway. A group of girls in their ballerina best. Boys receiving training in Safety Patrol. Tiny children propped on folding chairs paying rapt attention to their music instructor. And a drama class, complete with fainting couch and a large sign on the wall reading: “Enroll your child and inspire youth to seek a life of value.”

Of course, children often have their own ideas, and among the photos of children, also, are glimpses of a restless shaking-loose from the restraint of the Scurlock sensibility. A preschool girl smiles widely and directly into the camera as she prepares to cut her birthday cake. A group of boys dressed as clowns and circus animals express both ferocity and fun. Three thespians posed on the set of a school play bear expressions of grudging tolerance bordering on misery.

Who were these children and what were their lives like at that time? How do these moments sit in their memories? The information on many of the images in the collection is incomplete, and the Smithsonian welcomes any help in filling in the blanks. You can view much of the collection through their web portal, and also email them on specific photos. In this way, the story of the “Scurlock look” continues to unfold.

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We are vaguely in trouble already. We have been sending people out, one by one, to explore the property. From walks we’ve been led on by teachers, we know some of what we might find—a retirement home for nuns and its colorful garden laid out in the stations of the cross with a different flower at every pose of Christ, a cemetery for the same nuns with graves nameless to us (they were in Latin), a swimming pool with no water in it.

We are waiting for the last of our scouts, who hasn’t come back, for a very long time. It seems as if the bell never rings, which is a good thing. Then someone asks, “is he lost?” and I think to myself, at what exact moment did he get lost?

A few years ago, my husband and I drove to the Santa Cruz mountains where my cousins have a place that’s been in their family for years. I went there, as they call it, “down the country” as a child, and I remember images from some older American Dream, scoops of ice cream from a square scoop towering on a cone from Thrifty Drug, and a picnic afterwards at the beach, my mother happy in company with her friends, cooking enough chicken to feed many more families, with those other mothers, Mary Lou and Vicki.

But it was their voices not their cooking, somehow making the pattern out of social life, which was so mysterious. I encountered immediate terror whenever we joined our nuclear family together with any other. And so it was with a trepidation manifest under the surface with the force of memory that I went with my husband back to that place they still call the Country House. We drove, with directions, sure, but a phone with no service, and so I had to rely on images when my reading of my own handwriting gave out. To get to the image of how to get there, I had to go through an image of how it had been.

One summer, we read together a book about a family of lab mice that lived in a brick sunk into a field and the tragedy was that the brick was going to be moved, though the story was also told in flashbacks to the lab, in which the mouse mother had been poked and prodded into extreme intelligence by a set of tests after having human DNA spliced into her on birth. A terrifying book, as I remember, made more terrifying by the deck we read it on, nearly washed out the year before by a flood, and I remember my Aunt Vicki reading the ending in which the mice get resettled somewhere with no friends as the feet of my chair tilted dangerously in between rotting slats. But I was now lost in the present.

The truth was, we had gone there for the dead. My cousin’s mother-in-law, her husband Weldon’s mother, dead from alcohol, had loved that place even though it hadn’t been in her family, if a family means blood, as it often does regarding ownership. She hadn’t experienced the terror of social life there so great as not to love it, or she had medicated that terror or gotten over it, at least for a time, which before she died, and if the dead can remember, she must have remembered as a golden time.

The Country House is preceded on its driveway by a redwood grove in a perfect oval with a table in the middle, and they had set up a kind of shrine inside it, placing pictures of Jane and her family around, not quite at random, in the crannies of the trees and slight rises of the earth, and on the table set with food. The inside of that place so dark and cool it attained a quality of winter, so rare anywhere in California even with snow, and it was July.

I admired my cousin’s husband and thought to myself that day as I do now that he possesses some dignity that feels scarce in the world. His mother had loved wine and trees. And so, she had loved this place that wasn’t exactly hers, and as we walked around and people spoke of her, I thought, selfishly, maybe I should have allowed myself to love this earlier, though I did not need to ask for directions home and the way out did not flummox me.

Which summer did I return to the desert and why? The summer I got lost was the summer I did a lot of hiking with Jill, who is surely ten times as strong as you, whoever you are, reading this, and more agile, and so brave I do not wish to tell you her age for fear you will handicap what can stand on its own. Born in Britain, she said to me she was built for the West, meaning mountains. Desert mountains change color as the sun goes down—darkness of shadow rises from the bottom to grade the top to the shade of the sky. In the summer you hike at night. Jill took me straight up into some canyons she found on a map, her dog with us, we were trying to find a canyon made of marble and we didn’t, so we kept going. It doesn’t sound dramatic. For the lost person, landscape can bleed into abstraction. We kept moving our bodies through these seemingly impossible gaps in rock, kept finding the same sandy wash that led towards a steep drop off, impossible to scale down. Jill started talking about where we would “bivy,” bivoac, for the night, for we were close to home, but lost, and it was getting cold, and the temperature had dropped 30 degrees. I remember thinking, “but how can we sleep, lost?” I do not remember the moment we realized we had found the route of our return.

What is your name and where are you from? Will you sit? Let us place a chair under you and food in front of you. Let us do this before we ask you what your errand might be in this place. It is not that we have no questions. We are curious about your mother and your father, since we do not know them, and we are curious about whether you have brothers and sisters.

We are curious about whether you have quarreled with them or whether your trip has come at their expense or whether they have sent you out like a dove from the ark, and in each of these cases we are curious about how it feels to you, whether it feels as it was originally intended, your journey, or whether it feels different. That you went out like a dove but now travel as an exile. We wish to know many things about you.

But we have an understanding that your hunger might distract you from your truth, or from the enjoyment of telling your story, which we will also enjoy, loving, as we do, in this part of this country, stories, especially stories of difficulty that take a long time to tell and cannot be summarized, so we invite you to eat. We have watched you turn from a speck into a stick and then a pillar and now a person walking towards us.

We want to know about the ocean, the mountains, the valley, the further mountains, the tunnel of a pass you passed through to get here, the pass that used to have a tollbooth where they took your money before they let you go and now has nothing but a stand of trees. We are interested in knowing what it cost you to arrive, and what it costs, these days, to get where we are.

But eat first. We wonder if you would like to look over your shoulder to see where you have come from. We don’t mind if you take a long look, we don’t mind if, for a long time, you don’t speak. We are so grateful you have come, though we do not know why and cannot say why, and when we watched you coming closer to us the sentence that overtook us was one of us has been saved.

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Ninety-nine of his works are now on view in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Visitors can take a visceral journey through the American West and the motifs that Ruscha found most fascinating and worthy of re-interpreting during 50 years of living and working in California.

His notable captivation with landscapes is embodied in his depictions of sunsets with brilliant gradations of red, orange, and yellow. These often serve as backdrops for words or images that suggest the vastness of the western landscape and the enormousness of the sky.

Ruscha has spoken of this connection between the sky and the character of the region, saying, “The East I associate with steel and industrialism; the West with space and sunrises and sunsets.” The gas station has also been an important element of Ruscha’s work, and a photograph taken in 1962, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, became the basis for several of his best-known paintings and prints.

Ruscha also captured the changes in Los Angeles during the 1960s as it became a major urban center of the West Coast, while suburban sprawl and the construction of freeways contributed to its emerging car culture. He took hundreds of photographs from its roadways in a kind of documentary style—empty lots, apartment houses, and buildings along the Sunset Strip—and used them to create photographic books that were part artistic investigation, part visual travelogue of the eccentric and banal places in the city that had been built around and for the automobile.

Other works comment on the city and its cultural touchstones, including his famous “Technicolor” renditions of the Hollywood sign, and other subjects that symbolize the romantic aura and excesses of the film industry.

Today, Ruscha continues to work at the age of 78, maintains a studio in the California desert, and still makes regular road trips. Asked in 2011 about a road trip he would like to take in the future, Ruscha was optimistic: “It would need to be a dirt road somewhere here in the state of California in the desert, somewhere that lets me do some exploration on roads without any maps. There are still a few I’ve never tried, and I want to believe that wild spots still exist out there.”

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As I grew up, like most Philadelphians, I accepted as normal the run-down condition of my city, a once burgeoning industrial metropolis exploding with promise. The boom years, between the Civil War and World War II, define most of Philadelphia architecturally. Solidly constructed, the edifices erected in this period projected a bright optimism of a maturing civilization, a creative urbanity that played a role in shaping the nation culturally and intellectually.

It took a period of exposure to Europe in 1990, while working as a roadie on a 50-city tour with the punk band Shudder to Think, to open my eyes to the real tragedy of Philadelphia’s chronic 20th-century decline. In Europe you can feel the pride and dignity expressed in the preserved architectural history. It was a revelation to see that previous heydays can be preserved, can remain clearly legible, still thought-provoking and energizing. In Europe I came into contact with not only marvelous buildings saved by the prevailing culture but also historic buildings being saved and renewed by youth subculture.

Most impressive to me was the Reitschule, a massive old riding academy built in 1897 in central Bern, Switzerland. Its provocative late Victorian style reminded me of home. This once vacant hulk was taken over by youths in the 1980s, who transformed the 19th-century complex into an autonomous culture center providing a bevy of cultural and human services—theaters, large-scale sculpture, music, nightlife, housing, printing, darkroom, café, meeting center, you name it. All arranged through a consensus building procedure traditionally understood as anarchy. I found that punk can be viewed as a bulwark movement against commercialism in defense of culture.

Returning to Philadelphia in 1991, I felt a mounting sense of mourning and frustration at the desperate state of so many historic buildings across the city. Pride of place has always been something I’ve shared with my fellow Philadelphians, but it became mingled with a sense of shame at the realization that America’s fatalism in the face of urban decay was an aberration among prosperous nations. The great architectural dilemma of our times is the impossibility of assessing civic value in business terms. There is no bottom line assigned to real estate’s civic, social, and historic worth.

In the early ‘90s I set out to photograph Philadelphia’s buildings as an exercise in understanding this chronic decline and its impact on our shared heritage. At that time, the plague of neglect was beginning to consume Center City, the third largest downtown in the country. My framing of subjects was in a portrait style and I aimed to capture a sense of interiority, allowing stones to speak. Most of the buildings I managed to capture were caught at a pivotal point. One could still clearly see the promise they once expressed, and the possibility of rekindling it.

In my 2014 book of these photographs, City Abandoned, Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia, I collected stories that leant testimony to my subject’s history and plight. More than a third of the 92 public buildings in the book have been demolished. Almost half have found a new purpose. The rest remain vacant and in limbo.

The individual portraits add up to a collective failure of historic stewardship. Our city’s leadership has been burdened and its pride beaten down by decades of urban neglect and racial segregation. In the second half of the 20th century, when city cores across the country were being hollowed out, Philadelphia’s leaders feared they could not place any obstacles in the way of business development. Because of this legacy, Philadelphia, for all intents and purposes, continues to be without a functioning historic preservation code. The one in effect today has been crafted like Swiss cheese, notable mostly for its gaps. The city has neglected to survey and designate hundreds of historic landmarks from its more than two centuries of progress. Even when a building is fortunate to be recognized by a designation, it is no guarantee of survival.

The case of the Boyd Theater is a recent and salient example. Philadelphia’s last art deco movie palace in a city that once hosted dozens, the Boyd was a designated historic landmark. When owners threatened to demolish it, the public staged numerous protests and flooded every public hearing in defense of this important architectural masterpiece. The battle continued for years with a succession of determined owners. But in the end the city and the state did not rise to the theater’s defense as lawyers argued it had no potential for reuse—though many other American cities have preserved art deco theaters as public-private ventures. The theater was demolished last year.

Buildings, particularly historic ones, can form profound emotive connections. They represent perhaps our closest and most meaningful bond to the material world. These are shared connections for family, neighbors, and community. When the Sears, Roebuck Co. Clock Tower was imploded in Northeast Philadelphia in 1994, tears were shed by hundreds, as if a loved one had just died. People rushed the site to claim souvenirs once the smoke and dust had cleared, trying to retain a piece of the monument and what it had symbolized in their lives and for the neighborhood. This officially undesignated but universally recognized landmark was now groomed for a new strip mall development contributing to the geography of nowhere.

Regardless, Philadelphians have remained proud of this town and that pride is growing as it draws fresh recruits. The high water mark of urban decline was reached in the mid-1990s. Turnaround was in the air in the early 2000s, when savvy developers like Tony Goldman—who had helped breathe life back into SoHo in Manhattan and Miami’s South Beach—staked out his claim in one of the more badly deteriorated sections of Center City, 13th Street. Goldman was one of those rare developers who could identify walkable, architecturally rich districts that were undervalued and plagued by poor quality of life.

This summer, local developer Eric Blumenfeld, a disciple of Goldman, is unveiling one of the more remarkable architectural comebacks: the Divine Lorraine, a former 1894 luxury apartment house which became one of the earliest integrated first-class hotels in the nation in 1948. This distinct landmark has finally been renovated with apartments and retail, after sitting vacant for some 16 years after a stint as the home to Father Divine’s International Peace Mission Movement.

Thirteenth Street was the first area in the city to go from tenderloin to très chic, with boutiques and some of the city’s most popular restaurants and bars. North Broad Street is clearly next with the opening of the Divine Lorraine. Philadelphia`s popularity has surged in the past 15 years, to an almost unfathomable degree to long-time residents. It is partly this city’s charm and status as a birthplace to our republic that draws newcomers here. But it is more than that.

Despite the ravages it has withstood, Philadelphia continues to pull in more and more people who crave the feeling of being somewhere authentic. Somewhere with a memory.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

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In times of stillness one will use their way of being to avoid and some will use their way of being to search. We are certain ways in certain places. You don’t think of who else was here but what it was they made when they were. I want you to know I was here once. I want the world to know I was always here.

Please forgive me but the first time dreaming took place you were there and in the times since it has always been a different you present. When someone describes a first time there is so much sadness knowing there were other times too; the first time you waited for rain, nothing changed.

You describe the last light and then I put the fragile thing back together in secret. You carry the baby’s breath in your pocket and I consume the citrus whole and halved. You name nine moons and I look over your images. It is unclear which one of us will admit having nothing to give and nothing to take have never meant the same thing.

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Making Songbook, Soth said, reaffirmed his affection for Americans’ regional quirks.

“If you talk to anyone enough, they end up being weird,” he said. “We’re all a little bit weird once you get in there. That’s true of much of America, and it’s kind of a relief.”

“We talk about the country as being all malls and everything is TGI Fridays and generic, but if you go in the back of TGI Fridays and talk to the cook for a while, it gets more interesting,” he added.

Soth, who is based in Minneapolis, said he was looking to reconnect with the world around him after his last project, Broken Manual, which followed survivalists, hermits, and other men who wanted to run away from society. Soth thought about the way community newspapers stay in sync with the regular pulse of a town, documenting the actions of local leaders, sports teams, and hobbies.

Soth and writer Brad Zellar decided to “report” on about a dozen states and publish their accounts in a play on the newspaper called The LBM Dispatch. They spent about two weeks in each state. They avoided well-documented places like New York City and Los Angeles in favor of cities and small towns in the middle of the country. In the seven installments they’ve made of The LBM Dispatch, they’ve chronicled regions such as upstate New York; the Silicon, San Joaquin, and Death valleys of California; and the “megapolitan” area of Texas known as the “Texaplex.”

Songbook’s title riffs on the idea of the “Great American Songbook,” and uses only the photographs from those travels. Soth said the project gave him a chance to call up  “that America of the past when people used to read newspapers and have songs in common, even though that’s a bit of a fantasy.”

In the end, Soth was impressed by the multitude of ways Americans still seek to connect with each other in the flesh.

“What we have in America, in broad strokes, is this celebration of individualism and cowboys and the self-made man and all that,” he said. “But it’s clear that only goes so far. And in the end, the cowboy comes home, and he needs to go to the doctor.”

Songbook is on display at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis through April 4.

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