After months of nearly non-stop campaigning, President Obama and his team have spent the last two weeks crisscrossing the country to make their final appeals to voters. Veteran political photographer Brooks Kraft has been there to document the campaign’s final days.
This was the eighth presidential campaign that Kraft has photographed, and his sixth for TIME. Over the years, he has honed his approach to shooting some of the most photographed men and women in the United States. Kraft rarely takes his pictures from the press platforms, preferring to move around, searching out unique angles and small details.
“I attempt to work around all the messaging and clutter surrounding the candidate, to take photographs that reflect the character of the campaign,” he told TIME.
These photographs, many shot in so-called ‘battleground’ states, capture the energy and exhaustion of a campaign winding down. Kraft captures both the quiet details—from Secret Service agents on a distant roof to a close-up of a pink breast cancer awareness bracelet on the President’s wrist — and the dramatic moments — ecstatic crowds pressing toward the stage and the President silhouetted against spotlights as he speaks.
Shooting politics for so many years has allowed Kraft to make iconic pictures that transcend the obvious. “Shooting campaigns requires patience and persistence,” he said. “It can take many days of long travel to find images that can last beyond the daily news cycle.”
Brooks Kraft is a Washington D.C.-based photographer.
