"Presenting Mister Lincoln"

It was 20 years ago that Lance Mack first realized that he bore a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. He was teaching German at the University of Michigan when he had this revelation, and to him the only thing to do was “to figure out what to do with it.”

John Richard made this short documentary portrait that explores the intersection of history, family, religion and the ways that these ideas form and shape the way that Lance (and America) are responding to the present state of economic insecurity.

Richard also shares his thoughts with us about the "game changing" DSLR, by taking us a few hundred years back in time. Please enjoy "Presenting Mister Lincoln" from John Richard. And be sure to watch the video commentary afterwards.

John Richard has lived most of his life in the Midwest of the United States, where he went to college and studied environmental science.

- During this time, I discovered mountain climbing and spent a lot of time traveling and taking pictures of the things that my friends and I were doing.

- Storytelling was an important part of our community and I had a lot of fun organizing slide shows and special events to celebrate our culture. Having an audience for my work also gave me the incentive that I needed to learn more about photography and explore storytelling in different ways. I used the photographs that I made during this time to get a job at a newspaper and I have been doing photojournalism ever since.

Looking at the future of journalism by looking at the past

- As I look toward the future of journalism and multimedia, I try not to dwell on the significance of any particular type of device. With HD video capture now in our mobile phones, it seems clear that we are fast approaching a time when the tools for creating multimedia are available to anyone who is inspired to use them. In a way, we are returning to a situation that evokes the time before the dominant forms of storytelling were so strongly influenced by technology.

I am reminded of an experience I had several years ago while I was living in Denmark where I was introduced to a man named Grev (Count) Lyhne. Since childhood, Lyhne considered his true calling to be that of a Court Jester and he makes his life as a fortune-teller and patron of circus arts. As I learned more about him, I came to recognize a kinship between his role as a Jester and my own role as a journalist and multimedia storyteller. I think that there are several aspects of this that can illustrate my thoughts about how the "game" is changing.

Court Jesters were familiar to aristocrats during the Elizabethan Era who employed these "fools" not simply to entertain, but to criticize their masters and their guests. The Jester's place amid the powerful belied his official station in life which was outside or at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It was this fact, however, that enabled Jesters to become trusted council to ruling class elites since they were less likely to have a vested interest in any particular region or religion.

It was not until the mid 17th century that this tradition officially came to an end when Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell of the Puritan Christian Republic of England decided that he had, "no place for such fripperies as Jesters". Despite this obvious oversight, an allowance for a similar state of exception persists today in the laws and attitudes that permit "licensed fools" such as journalists, playwrights, filmmakers and artists to enjoy a similarly privileged position from which to observe, reflect, and comment on society.

"Licensed fools" such as journalists, playwrights, filmmakers and artists [do] enjoy a similarly privileged position from which to observe, reflect, and comment on society.

During the 20th Century, technological limitations constrained the role of mass-communication and storytelling to a small number of individuals who had resources available to spend on production equipment and distribution. Today the most significant advantage enjoyed by established media is in its ability to promote itself, but this is becoming less important as social media empowers alternative channels for distribution.

The result for journalists is that we approach a situation that is reminiscent of that of the Jester in that our reach is not governed by our position in society, but by our ability to compete for the attention of an audience. Likewise, our power and influence extend only as far as we are trusted and our every action must reconcile the paradox inherent to our profession; that our essential usefulness to society is, in part, a result of our distance from it.

This all comes full-circle when we consider the Jester's intimate relation to the circus, a carnivalesque that prefigures both journalism and cinema. Like magic mirrors, each of these reflect its present moment in perfected or inverted analogy and poses together elements that would otherwise be incompatible. Each one performs this slight-of-hand in a different way, with the cinema having the most concentrated resources and sophisticated visual language.

The most significant thing about HD-DSLRs is that they allow and encourage journalists and other storytellers, without large budgets, to begin speaking in the language of cinema and experimenting with the multitude of storytelling techniques it offers. I hope that websites such as this one can continue to promote the use of these tools in the pursuit of storytelling and help to cultivate a thoughtful attitude toward the subjects we capture.

The tech-stuff

- My video was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and several lenses including a 24-105mm, 70-200mm, and my favorite, a 35mm. Everything was hand-held, except for a few shots where I used a tripod. Most of the audio was recorded by the internal microphone. I actually met the main character in the film the day after my 5D arrived, so I only had my still photography gear to work with. Later in the project, I purchased a small Marantz digital recorder, a Rode shotgun microphone, and a wireless lavaliere microphone.

BONUS: Abe goes Rogue Also take a look at: "Presenting Mister Lincoln, act two: Abe Goes Rogue".

John Richard is a photojournalist and short-film director living in Iowa. His non-fiction work highlights the lives of interesting people and explores the ways that they talk about what they do.

His current projects include short films about the circus and digital art.