A Look Back at 2022...In Photos

Senior White House Photojournalist Olivia Pasquale photographs Vice President Kamala Harris as she delivers remarks during a political fundraiser in Philadelphia on October 28th (Andrew McKeough/AKSM Photography).

“ Each photo is a story that simultaneously allows me to recall the exact emotion I felt when witnessing the original moment.”

Photo Essay by Olivia Pasquale, Senior White House Photojournalist

WASHINGTON - What I see in these 10 photos are 2022’s strongest feelings. Pride, excitement, focus, determination, victory, relief, and grief. This year’s 9/11 coverage was my first ever assignment as a White House photojournalist, and I found myself in the front row of a large group of other photographers, looking constantly to my left and right wondering if I would take the right shots, feeling like an imposter.

It was not more than a few minutes later when the event started that my worries became irrelevant, as I snapped away, eventually collecting 1,300 photos. Most looked generic, and I was not proud of them because they portrayed only what happened exactly at that moment. They were shallow and boring, but it was the smaller amount of all-encapsulating images that I came to be most proud of. They were darker than I wanted, poorly composed, with rain drops on my lens, but that’s what contextualized the sorrow and chaos of that individual 9/11 memorial. When Jill Biden comforted the flight attendants speaking during the memorial, I ignored the photos I had taken that showed composure and the ones that were centered in the frame, and focused instead on the one where Dr. Biden’s tears were welling, and her eyes were sharply focused on the flight attendant’s as she comforted him. The photo captured the relinquishing of a happy facade in addition to the grief and empathy we all felt that day.

I realized that the photos I took on 9/11 could preserve meaning and emotions that cannot be adequately conveyed through the unbiased nature of a news article. Writers are bound to the rules of writing, to the limitations of bias. But I feel like as a photographer, I’ve been privileged with a superpower: boundlessness. I feel grateful that I can supplement my colleagues’ amazing writing with a different kind of story, made not by words but by everyday people and objects, and my own eyes. That boundlessness, I realized, was my purpose in being there that day. I had to seek out angles that would let me communicate stories and emotions entirely in a 2-D frame.

As I have ventured through the rest of the year, I have gained hundreds of new perspectives. Each photo is a story that simultaneously allows me to recall the exact emotion I felt when witnessing the original moment. 2022 has shown me that photojournalism is an opportunity for me to be a stronger artist and a better human being, sharing all these imperfect photos with confidence, hoping you as a viewer will feel the same feelings I did when I look at them. Though 2022 has been my first experience with photojournalism on this level and international news coverage, the lesson I will take with me into 2023 is that news is never the same. It’s constantly changing and breaking and the only thing I can do is be there to make sure you can experience the excitement, love, sorrow, or pain in each moment I am lucky enough to witness.