Election night at The New York Times has been documented in photos for decades. This year, Sara Krulwich and Simbarashe Cha, two Times staff photographers, were in the newsroom in Manhattan, making images of the night as it transitioned into morning.
Ms. Krulwich has taken photos for The Times for 45 years. She used to cover politics, but in 1995 she became a photographer for the Culture desk, focusing primarily on theater. Early on in her career, she covered Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1984.
“She was short and so was I, so I went everywhere with a little stepladder on my shoulder in order to get a better vantage point for my photos,” Ms. Krulwich, who is 5 feet 3 inches tall, said.
Mr. Cha, who has a fashion and cinematography background, leads Style Outside, a visual column that documents street fashion — so the fluorescent lighting and cluttered desks of the newsroom are not his normal backdrop.
“There’s a part of me that finds documenting politics to be very unsexy,” he said. “But shooting the newsroom in black and white made me think about the space in a different way.”
Below, see a selection of photographs that Mr. Cha and Ms. Krulwich captured in the newsroom on election night, with annotations.
This is Rob Szypko, left, a senior producer for “The Daily,” with Michael Barbaro, the podcast’s host. Around 1:25 a.m., Mr. Barbaro headed to the recording studio for a round-table discussion with the Times journalists Nate Cohn, Lisa Lerer and Astead W. Herndon.
Election coverage requires extensive collaboration across newsroom departments and desks. Here, Elizabeth Kennedy, the White House editor, and Elisabeth Bumiller, who leads the Washington bureau (center left and right, both seated), discuss coverage plans with the Politics editor, David Halbfinger, left, and the National editor, Jia Lynn Yang.
This is Amy Kelsey, the deputy director of news design for the print newspaper, working on the front page for Nov. 6. The first edition of the newspaper went to press at 5 p.m. Eastern time, but editors and designers scrambled to adjust late editions as the polls closed and more results came in. The last edition was sent to the printers at 10 p.m. Eastern.
Here you can see Carolyn Ryan, a managing editor who shapes politics coverage, and Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, discussing the night’s events with a group of journalists. Mr. Cha captured this image from across the newsroom. He chose to photograph from afar so he wouldn’t disrupt the work of the reporters. “I did my best to keep from distracting them,” Mr. Cha said.
Ms. Krulwich captured senior editors talking from The Times’s fourth floor, which is open to the main newsroom area below. Here, she had a high vantage point — but that was not always the case. “Since I am short, the enormous computers on people’s desks were often blocking my view,” she said. “This problem was solved when I reached into my locker and found my Ferraro ladder. I still keep it in my locker, 40 years later.”
Results poured in earlier than expected. “The race didn’t provide the kind of high-stakes suspense one would expect,” Mr. Cha said. People around the country were prepared to wait days to know who had won the presidency, but the official call for Donald J. Trump came soon after 5:30 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.
Though the assignment was a change for Mr. Cha, he embraced being in the newsroom with his colleagues during what will be remembered as a monumental election. “I never would have thought that I would be in The New York Times’s newsroom on such a significant and historically consequential night,” he said.
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