Four years ago, as Joseph R. Biden Jr. was inaugurated president, the National Mall was filled not with crowds but with a field of nearly 200,000 flags. They symbolized the people who could not attend the ceremony because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased security measures following the storming of the Capitol.
“The strangest part about it was the silence,” Ruth Fremson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for The New York Times, said in a recent email. She was on assignment that day. “The silence felt like the country was collectively holding its breath to see if this transition of power would actually happen,” she added.
Several days later, as the Mall was cleaned up, visitors were free to take flags with them. Remembering the storytelling power of artifacts collected by The Times’s great Washington photographer, George Tames (1919-1994), whom she met while she worked at The Washington Times, Ms. Fremson helped herself to a few. She donated one flag to the Museum at The Times, where it was displayed until 2024, when it was replaced with artifacts from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ms. Fremson will be posted at the Capitol on Monday during Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. “I certainly will be looking out at the Mall again and remembering the 2020 inauguration,” she wrote. “It will be quite the contrast.”
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