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When Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arrived in the press room of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill last month to have her photo taken for The New York Times, she was wearing a gray suit like the one John F. Kennedy was depicted wearing in his official White House portrait.
Unlike Kennedy’s portrait, which was painted posthumously and was noted for its melancholy tone, Ms. Pelosi is looking directly at the camera in her photos. Her arms are uncrossed, and she appears ready to return to her post as speaker of the House. The photographers wanted to reflect the significance of Ms. Pelosi as a key newsmaker in 2019.
“She is the only woman that has achieved the level of elected office that she has,†Ms. Herman said. “She is formative in defining what being a woman in power is.â€
Ms. Pelosi’s image appears online and in a special section of Thursday’s paper alongside 129 other female senators and representatives in the 116th United States Congress, who were photographed in December and early January.
The Times is printing 27 versions of the section, one at each of the paper’s print sites around the country. Each edition will feature a different female member of Congress on the cover according to a print site’s location.
“We have written tons of stories on the elections and who got elected,†Beth Flynn, deputy photo editor at The Times, said. “But I think this is a smart, elegant way to see change.â€
Ms. Herman, a photographer and doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied how portraits have appeared historically. Typically, artists depicted American political figures, like George Washington or Calvin Coolidge, formally dressed, posed in grand-looking rooms with objects of significance like a sword or a book.
“These portraits conveyed that they were important, powerful men,†Ms. Herman said. “We have a different class of lawmakers than we have had before, and why shouldn’t they get access to that imagery, access to that gravitas, that the generations before them did?â€
Ms. Herman had recently photographed the newly elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on election night for The Times. She left thinking about how all these women would transition to their new jobs in Washington.
Ms. Herman brought the idea to photograph members of Congress, in the style of historical political portraits, to Marisa Schwartz Taylor, a photo editor in the Washington bureau of The Times. The photo editors, who had been considering a similar project, suggested they take portraits of all the women of Congress and assigned the photographer Celeste Sloman to partner with Ms. Herman.
Working from a multi-tabbed spreadsheet, they contacted each congressional office individually. “We had no idea if it would be possible,†Ms. Herman said.
On two separate trips, the two photographers drove from New York, lugged their equipment through security on Capitol Hill and set up their lights and backdrops.
As news of the project spread, congressional offices that had been difficult to reach contacted Ms. Herman and Ms. Sloman directly to be photographed. Only one woman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, wasn’t available to be photographed.
Over five days, the photographers worked in five- to 30-minute blocks taking portraits of the members.
They encouraged the members to bring in articles of significance. Senator Tammy Baldwin carried a bobblehead doll. Senator Tina Smith brought a wooden pheasant. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz wore the pink boxing gloves that Senator Amy Klobuchar had given her as a gift for beating breast cancer.
Some of the women resisted being identified as female politicians. They preferred to be seen as politicians who happened to be women. But Ms. Schwartz Taylor felt it was still important to ask women how they felt about being in power.
“Women in power are scrutinized on so many more levels than men in power,†she said. “I think it is important to hear these women’s own voices — instead of listening to everyone else’s perspective of them.â€
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