“Some of the rhetoric and political opinions I encountered were completely horrifying, but when I had actual one-on-one conversations with people, they couldn’t have been more pleasant. Which is the big tragedy of American politics,” says photographer Jamie Lee Taete of the final days of the US election. “That everyone is basically in the same boat and being convinced to hate each other by the powerful people that are actually making everyone’s lives miserable. Even Kari Lake, who spent a large portion of the speech that I attended pointing toward the media area and talking about how evil we all are, gave me and a couple of other photographers what felt like a pretty genuine thank you when she was leaving the event.”
{Photograph}: Jamie Lee Taete
