An acetate window

This is couple months old but I found the idea of holding up an acetate window intriguing... 
We are at a crossroads. It is the beginning of a new administration and the end of an old one. There are those who would like to forget the last eight years. It’s the magic-slate idea. As if you could lift up an acetate window and those eight years would suddenly vanish.

Photographs make this somewhat more difficult. They are a partial record of who we were and how we imagined ourselves. They remind us that we have a past and that we are the sum of our past experiences. They reassert that unassailable fact.

Btw, that's from a post by Errol Morris, a filmmaker whose movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004.

You should go read the entire post as it is a neat photographic coverage of George W. Bush in the last week of his Presidency.

The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration.

My favorite picture is this one:

UNITED STATES, Washington : US president-elect Barack Obama (R) waves while walking with President George W. Bush after arriving at the White House November 10, 2008 in Washington. Obama is visiting the White House at the invitation of Bush ahead of his January 20, 2009 inauguration as the next president. (Tim Sloan/Agence France-Presse)

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Why do you like the picture so much?
VINCENT AMALVY: We don’t understand what is going on. Why does the shadow appear? I suppose it’s a shadow of somebody else beyond the corner. But the picture is only of two guys walking. It’s a profile of George Bush and Barack Obama. And he’s near the Rose Garden of the White House. And so in the back is a shadow of somebody who says, “Bye-bye.” And it is looking like a joke, but it is amazing.

Indeed! Bye-Bye, Bush!