Political year | Scene Through the Lens

My colleagues and I photographed Cherelle L. Parker as she was sworn in as the 100th mayor of Philadelphia last week, kicking off a year in politics that will culminate with November’s presidential election.

I covered my first campaign for the White House for The Inquirer in 1984. Since then, covering the men and women who would be president has been one of my favorite assignments every four years.

Walter Mondale eventually won his party’s nomination that year, but lost the November election to incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan, who won 525 of 538 electoral votes -- the most ever by a presidential candidate, and one of the country’s most lopsided defeats (Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia).

Surprisingly, I photographed Mondale again, some two decades later, while covering our current president’s second, unsuccessful run for the office.

In 2008 Joe Biden was making his pitch to a county Democratic Party meeting. I was the only out of town media person there, following our “local” candidate, the then-senior U.S. Senator from nearby Delaware. He was the only candidate appearing in-person. The other leading party candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and John Edwards sent surrogates. Everyone was surprised when the former vice president walked in. Mondale drove down from Minnesota to speak on behalf of Clinton, the then-junior U.S. senator from New York.

Biden dropped out of the race after receiving less than 5% of the caucus vote, and Obama, the winner in Iowa, eventually selected him as his running mate. It was a historic year.

I posted a single photo on my blog here, on every single one of the 366 days in 2008 (it was a leap year), beginning with photos from Iowa and New Hampshire.

2024 looks to be just as historic.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: