The Barack Obama Project, an installation, intervention and lecture by Vincent van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal, investigates the role of photographic representation within the 2008 Democratic race for the presidential nomination. The political dimension of the photographic representation has become poignant in the candidates' efforts to obtain the nomination for their party, generating excesses like the controversy concerning the a photo of Barack Obama used by Hillary Clinton's campaign, presumably portraying him 'more black' than he actually is, compared to the original, 'unaltered' image that K Magazine published at the same time. The 'manipulation' was most probably performed in order to stress Barack Obama's African-American heritage.

The small riot that occurred after the discovery of this photographic 'manipulation' recalls a similar riot after the publication of apparently 'darkened' images of O.J. Simpson by Time Magazine in 1994. Newsweek published the same picture the same week, 'unmanipulated', which rendered the difference obvious. The illustrator from Time Magazine, Matt Mahurin, later confided that he wanted to make O.J. Simpson's mugshot "more artful, more compelling."

These issues raise fundamental questions on the standards maintained in the discussion on race and its representation in the media. For example, the ten-step gray scale that was standardized during the early stages of black and white photography was based on pure light and pure darkness at both ends of the scale and the color of a white male's palm as the 'neutral' centre point. Since all photographic technology that has been developed since was based on this practical, apparently scientifically constructed scale, it would be theoretically impossible to create a 'representative' photograph of a black man. Representative would suggest here that it is possible that the image is well-presented within a system (photography) that is constructed in such a way that it would allow for such presentation. Thus, even on the most fundamental level, photography as a technique is not neutral.

The Barack Obama Project / A More Perfect Union is presented in three stages, entitled Study, Intervention and Installation. Their components comprise a video with one thousand continuously merging skin fragments taken from photographs of Obama, accompanied by the soundtrack of Obama's A More Perfect Union speech — his main speech concerning the controversial remarks on racial issues that were allegedly made by his reverent, a lightbox with a The Barack Obama Project logo and buttons showing the Obama campaign logo placed on 250 skin fragment buttons — meant for distribution among Obama supporters on the night of April 22, during the PA primaries at the volunteer headquarters in Chicago.

Van Gerven Oei and Staal raise a disturbing question that has to be faced in the current discussion surrounding the race-issue: even though Obama is literally represented within the project in a grand variety of differentiated aspects, still a choice has been made. A choice to pick one thousand apparently random photographs, a choice to pick an apparently random square selection from those photographs, a choice to compose, organize the selection in an apparently random composition. It is this choice that, in itself, can not be included in any 'objective' representation. A comparable choice is presented in a recent remark quoted from an Obama event coordinator saying: "Get me more white people, we need more white people", in order to balance the amount of African-Americans in the audience behind the main speaker, Obama's wife Michelle. The representation of unity in front of the camera, in this respect, entails including, excluding, adding or subtracting individuals according to the same characteristics that have to be canceled out in the main picture.

The Barack Obama Project deals with the fundamental aspects of the act of representation. By reducing the different photos of Obama on a seemingly formalistic level, not acknowledging the context and conditions under which a photo has been made, but instead purely focusing on the skin selections from Obama's cheeks, the artists are confronting and confronted with the essence of the photographic practice: namely being an fundamentally ethical, not only formal, technical or abstract process. By showing, and moreover, including this aspect within The Barack Obama Project, the artists not only contest the illusory 'objective' quality of photography, but also stress the responsibility of the author: the responsibility for the act of placing between oneself and the another individual a device that cannot, under any circumstance, be acknowledged as a neutral mediator; the responsibility for the ideologically and morally charged basis from which one chooses to perform this act, an act of a profoundly ethical nature: an act of representation.

Read the interview of Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal with Anne E. Moore on the Barack Obama Project at the Anti-Advertising Agency.