March 29, 2024

Event Coverage Highlight

Christopher Morris Presents Trump Photos in Paris

Christopher Morris discusses his photos with attendees at the American Library in Paris. Photo: Christopher Dickey

Christopher Morris discusses his photos with attendees at the American Library in Paris. Photo: Christopher Dickey

By Vivienne Walt

On Nov. 30, the OPC co-hosted an evening at the American Library in Paris with veteran photographer and OPC award winner Christopher Morris, who showed photos and video of Donald Trump’s election campaign that he took while on assignment for TIME magazine.

Morris’s close-up look at Trump’s candidacy drew a standing-room-only crowd of about 100 people. Just three weeks after the election, the audience – a mix of American and French – was enthralled by Morris’s description of Trump’s performance on the stump, as well as his throngs of supporters. Morris said that while traveling on the campaign trail, he felt the Trump phenomenon was like a “tidal wave” sweeping the U.S., that would be impossible for any candidate to overcome. Most chilling was Morris’s video footage, which he shot for TIME using an extreme slow-motion camera, that was overlaid with audio of Trump’s speeches. The effect gave the 2016 campaign an almost dystopian quality, which provoked a lot of discussion.

The evening was organized by OPC board member Vivienne Walt and former board member Christopher Dickey – both based in Paris – in collaboration with American Library director Charles Trueheart, a former Washington Post correspondent, and the library’s program director, Grant Rosenberg, a former TIME correspondent. To Walt and Dickey, the library, which sits in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, seemed the perfect place to introduce the OPC to Paris, a city that’s experienced more than its share of major news lately. Not only is the library run by former journalists, but it has been a convivial place for American writers since it opened in 1920 – even before the OPC! – and counts among its early members Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.