Our Leaders #gramed

Instagram have teamed up with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to capture a never-before-seen moving portrait series of Australia's political leaders.

The initiative allows instagram to be your front row ticket and backstage pass to the 2016 Federal Election, and brings a ground breaking, and uniquely artistic perspective to the hotly contested political landscape.

Captured at 9 frames per second by Walkley Award-winning Fairfax Media photographer Nic Walker, this series will showcase the Prime Minister, Opposition Leader and other political leaders reacting to visual prompts - from images of family, to other world leaders and factional competitors.

Throughout modern history, photographs have revealed and connected the truth behind the politics in an accessible medium to audiences around the globe. These portraits convey the human element of our political leaders that Australians ask for, but rarely see.

The series has been released exclusively on The Age and Sydney Morning Herald's Instagram accounts, these portraits are the first time our leaders have been captured in this groundbreaking, artistic and immersive fashion.

From the Oscars and the U.S. Presidential candidates, to the Cannes Film Festival and the MTV Europe Music Awards, people have used Instagram to capture the essence of major cultural moments around the world.

Smartphones have found their way into the pockets of generations of Australians, and that has affected the way they communicate ideas, moments and stories. With over 500m accounts around the world, Instagram is the way that we now visually experience elections, and this series is a world class example of giving voters an insight into the more human side of their political leaders.

As smartphones have evolved the way we communicate, so too has the way we think about art and photography. Whether the US Presidential Primaries, the Met Gala, the Cannes film festival, or the NBA Draft, moving portraits posted to Instagram have synthesized the main players of these cultural moments into short, creative vignettes.

Instagram believes that when people experience events through images, it can expand their understanding and deepen the stories being reported.

 

This is Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop (@juliebishopmp) in the second in a series of 10 moving vignettes captured by Fairfax photographer Nic Walker (@NicWalker101) for a Fairfax Media and @Instagram series Election 2016: Our Leaders. Walker, the project’s creative director and photographer, describes the collaboration as "a chance to play with traditional portraiture and moving images with people who are largely inaccessible but on what is arguably the most democratic and most accessible social media platform in the world". The portraits involved capturing micro-expressions over a nine-second shoot. Each politician was shown six images that were chosen specifically to elicit a reaction (we won’t be revealing what they were, but you can have a guess). Nine frames were shot per second - 81 frames in all - so what you are seeing is reactions to images captured by the camera with no time for the subjects to consciously construct their expressions. "During an election campaign, you get the sense that politicians go into a mode where their image is very crafted and manufactured,” Walker said. “This project was all about eliciting a very human response to remind people that love or hate their ideas, politicians are people too.” #auspol #ausvotes #election2016 #auspolportraits #portraiture #portrait #photography #movingimage #theage

A video posted by The Age (@theagephoto) on Jun 26, 2016 at 7:14pm PDT