BBC Voter's Guide

I recently came acrosss something that struck my interest on the BBC website. It was called In Pictures: Maryland voter's views, Primary elections.

Primary Elections

I didn't know what to expect when I clicked this link. I imagined it would just be photographs of the Maryland primaries. However, I was very suprized to discover that it was a 10-part series of differnet primary voter's street-style portraits, a short bio and finally who they were castinf their vote for and why.

This may not seem like a revolutionary idea - in it's simplest form it is just a quick survey of Maryland voters. But to me, this idea has a unique appeal. Not only does it give you real life faces of consitutents, but it offers real insight into the voter's mind.

Of course there are always polls attempting to gague voter's opinions and cast light on the unfolding situation. But this feature really put you into the mids of Maryland voters. It gives you real, unmitigated, opinions of what voters think about candidates and the state of our nation. Additionally, I thought the BBC did a great job of collecting a variety of opinions. They had not only racial variety, but gender, age and class diversity. The opinions given by each voter refleted a little bit about each person and a little bit about our electoral system - namely the way voters approach their decisions.

I found it intriguing to read about why different people were voting for which candidate. Reasons ranged from having a woman in power, to a president being too old, to who can win against Obama. THis feature really sheds a lot of light on the differnt facets of a presidential candidate that are weighed in his electability factor and which kind of person values which facet.

As a photographer the portraits of these people were interesting to me because they were obviously quick set ups -but they were also more than just a quick news photo. The photographer took time with each one to capture a certain expression or feeling from each photo. For that reason I believe the photos flowed well with the text to make a unique and appealing web feature.