Washington, UNITED STATES
Pictures of the Year: U.S. Politics
A combination of photos taken at the National Mall shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (L) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009, Washington, U.S. Lucas Jackson: "The assignment was simply to shoot the inauguration from the Washington Monument. To avoid confusion I made sure to transmit crowd pictures while Trump was onstage with the crowd at its peak. Twitter quickly erupted with claims that my images were taken early in the morning or photoshopped to remove attendees. At his first briefing, the President's new press secretary, Sean Spicer, said: "Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past." This was not true. It was a new experience to have the validity of such a straightforward image questioned. After that press conference the picture was everywhere. Later, CNN released an image it took from the portico of the U.S. Capitol as Trump was sworn in. That vantage point is several hundred feet lower than the Washington Monument so the crowd looks bigger than in my picture. A second wave of 'liar' inundated me on Twitter. I ignored the noise but posted a copy of my image on Instagram with the caption: "Perspective; it matters." Later people noticed that the clock on the Smithsonian building in my picture shows the time at 1:15. Social media tried to claim my images were taken over an hour after the inauguration once the crowd had thinned. But the Smithsonian said its clock was broken and was stuck on that time." REUTERS/Lucas Jackson (L), Stelios Varias SEARCH "POY TRUMP" FOR THIS STORY