Kansas campaigns aim to create photographic memories for voters through mailers • Kansas Reflector

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As voters headed to the polls Tuesday in Kansas’s primary, lines of names stared out from the ballot: J.R. Claeys, Tyler Wible, Tim Shallenberger, Jeff Klemp. First name, last name.

Back home, voters in their own countries probably had bins and bins of paper filled with political flyers, the seasonal advertising pamphlets we go through every few years.

The goal of those mailers? To replace black-and-white names on the ballot with familiar faces. Better yet? To replace those vague names with specific stories. Or emotions. Or values.

It’s fascinating to study the visual techniques that campaigns and political action committees—along with their graphic designers—use to transform a candidate’s name.

To support my visual-political research, Kansas Reflector readers shared mailers they received, and Opinion Editor Clay Wirestone shared them with me (along with writing a column of his own). Those 47 two-sided mailers are my source material here.

This set of mailers was particularly interesting because of the way they treated photography. So that’s my focus here: how mailers elevated their candidate — and sometimes denigrated the opposition — using images.

The friendly look of feathers

The blurred edges created by feathering soften a candidate’s image — or images of people that supporters hoped would connect them to favored candidates (such as the photo of former President Barack Obama).

Many ads treated candidate photos with an edge effect known as “feathering” among graphic designers. Notice how some photos appear to fade into opacity against a background color or an adjacent image. Each photo looks like a cloud, soft and faded onto the page.

This technique was used to promote candidates in the state who were running for elected office. The image of Rep. Kristey Williams, R-Augusta, was lightly feathered at the bottom. The image of Rep. Ken Corbet, R-Topeka, is blended in many directions.

The effect softens the candidate and creates a hazy and nostalgic feeling.

Under the harsh light of filters

What better way to annoy your rival than to make them look unattractive or sick? Using filters on images, designers made Republican U.S. House of Representatives candidate Derek Schmidt look three shades of hideous.

It’s easy to see the reverse effect these mailers use on photos: the filter. And unlike feathering, the filter isn’t doing a good job.

Typically, these filters are applied using Photoshop, the photo editing application created and distributed by graphic design giant Adobe. In the early days of Photoshop in the 1990s, aspiring photographers like myself were eager to use filters, digital distortion, or textures on our images. The results were unsubtle, to say the least.

Today, designers are showing a little more sophistication and restraint in their application of these filters — and they don’t have to settle for the filters and effects that Photoshop provides out-of-the-box. Designers are downloading hundreds of filters and loading them into Adobe’s software to make photos look like Civil War daguerreotypes or ’90s Seattle grunge rock posters.

These mailers show how filters are almost always used to paint a candidate negatively. Two mailers from Jeff Kahrs use filters to dehumanize Derek Schmidt’s face: in one mailer he is a jaundiced villain, in the other a flat purple caricature. Schmidt also faces unflattering filters in two mailers from the Kansas Conservative Fund.

Similarly, a mailer supporting Beverly Gossage’s campaign warns in all caps that “THE RADICAL LEFT IS COMING FOR KANSAS” while misleadingly darkening an image of a protester. The image is so dark that it resembles TIME magazine’s infamous cover of OJ Simpson, which was criticized for exaggerating Simpson’s skin color and equating his blackness with guilt. Budding journalists are still taught the dishonesty of this technique in ethics classes. Let’s hope political advertisers show the same restraint.

All in the family

The allure of family photos is creeping into political mailers, as candidates pose with their babies, adult children, spouses, and even dogs. You could mistake primary season for Christmas card season.

Another key technique of these mailers is the use of family photos. From Rep. Tory Marie Blew’s portrait on a crib with her husband and baby to Jacqueline Kelly’s family posing in front of a mural, candidates want you to know they’re married with kids.

Perhaps the family photos reassure voters that the candidates have roots in the community. Or that they can be trusted as parents and spouses. Or that they are committed to so-called family values. Either way, it’s a visual trope.

If Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is worried about childless cat ladies, maybe these family photos are a litmus test. To me, a candidate’s family — let alone a charming family photo — seems irrelevant. “I can govern effectively because I’m raising children with my spouse” is nonsense.

You can also put your dog in the spotlight, as Angel Roeser did in her campaign for the Kansas House of Representatives. Her golden retriever, complete with bandana and a smile for the camera, seems just as important as her husband, Joshua, by her side.

This is the real me (sort of)

Documentary photography promises to deliver an authentic version of its subjects, so it’s a bit disorienting when political mailers package canned photo opportunities as candid interactions.

After years of working as a photography teacher and photojournalist, I consider myself an expert in spotting a certain kind of photo. Let’s call them posed, spontaneous photos.

These are images that someone insisted on. Sometimes a lazy and ethically “flexible” photojournalist will place people in front of the camera, hoping that the scene will look spontaneous: a teacher pointing at a notebook in front of a seated student, an office worker smiling as they sit behind their carefully organized desk, a construction worker pointing into the distance while another man in a hard hat looks in that direction.

The images are usually transparent and posed, because ordinary people are bad at acting, even for something as simple and short as a photograph.

Schmidt’s campaign seemed most eager to show off his acting chops. In my eyes, it’s not working.

Schmidt having a casual conversation with a police officer next to a wall. Schmidt walking in front of a machine shed talking to two men we might assume are farmers. Schmidt making out with an old man in the back of a vintage pickup truck — cornily juxtaposed with Schmidt driving the Ford F-100 on the back of the mailer. (This was part of an extended metaphor for the campaign’s refurbishing of the truck.)

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the campaign brought a photographer to document all of these genuine interactions Schmidt had during the campaign. Maybe these photos of the man-of-the-people are legit.

But the photos seem cringey. Rather than portraying candidates as authentic and immersed in their communities, these posed, candid photos seem fundamentally dishonest. They seem contrived: This candidate is going to work so hard to appear authentic.

Other candidates are likely using similarly fake candid images in this batch of primary mailers. Schmidt’s opponent in the 2nd District U.S. House race, Shawn Tiffany, looked more natural in his campaign mailer. He’s on the farm in his cowboy hat, twirling a stalk of corn.

But that authenticity didn’t do Tiffany much good, as he lost to Schmidt by more than 30 points in a five-way race in Tuesday’s results.

Always in stock

Mailers supporting Tori Marie Blew feature the use of stock photos, purchased images that purport to represent political ideas. Keep an eye out for these images as the general election approaches.

One campaign wins my award for most (cough) ambitious use of photos. In addition to using the baby family portrait, mailers supporting Blew’s successful primary campaign for Kansas Senate in the 33rd district tried almost every technique available.

One mailer features a legitimate, candid image (we assume) of Blew speaking at the Statehouse. Another creates an awkward, confusing, and garish collage: Laura Kelly and her supporters stand there smiling as fingers emerge from their crowd to hold receipts. The message of the composite image is so confusing that it takes two sentences full of commas to overlay it and explain that the visual jumble is about inflation.

The most ambitious is the use of stock photos to support Blew’s campaign. Dozens of websites sell stock photos, generic images taken by contributing photographers. Use them in your political ad, your blog post, or your company’s website. To be fair, Kansas Reflector sometimes uses stock photos to illustrate stories — and I often combine them to create visuals for my commentary pieces.

The mailers for Blew showed how photos that I assume are stock photos can be used to make rhetorical points. The text of “Tory Marie Blew Delivers” is paired with an image of a delivery man carrying boxes. Another mailer from Americans For Prosperity supports Blew with a collage of random feathered stock photos.

In another, we read that she “put the axe in taxes” next to an image of an axe wedged into a stack of tax books. This one seems a little more awkward, since the tax codes seem absurd in their ornate binding — and a little on the nose with titles like “Tax” and “Tax Code, Vol. 1.” (“Hey, Ted, can you pass me our copy of the 1936 book ‘Tax’ that’s sitting on the shelf over there?”)

Yet these images can be effective in making their political points. How else could Blew’s campaign have visualized the concept of tax cuts? How else could Marvin Robinson’s failed primary campaign have shown himself to be a fighting champion of the people without boxing gloves and trophies as the centerpiece of his mailers?

In my experience, this technique of using stock photos in campaign mailers will become even more common as we move from the primaries to the general election. Your mailbox will likely be filled with many more images like this in the coming months.

Whether stock photos, filters, or non-candid images, these images are cognitive shorthand: memorable political images that we perceive in a moment but remember for much longer.

While the images on the mailers may not have been elegant, they likely helped Kansas residents connect the name on the ballot with someone or something they could vote for.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its Opinion section, Kansas Reflector amplifies the voices of those impacted by government policies or excluded from public discourse. Find information here, including how to submit your own commentary.

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