Power Lines
Introducing the love, journalism photo archives
I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is what Sundays look like at love, journalism — a dispatch from the notebook, unfiltered, from whatever year I happened to be living in.
Today’s edition launches a new series from my photo archives — decades of pics from the digital and analog eras. We’re piggybacking as well off my conversation with David Roberts and his career covering the infrastructure of energy to share what I’ve long thought of as my Power Lines series
I stumbled onto my own version of this story a long time ago without knowing it.
Every great shot I tried to take out a car window, driving through the country or across some corner of the world, there was a power line in it. My wife and I used to joke about it. We kept taking pictures and the power lines kept showing up.
Of course they would be there. They always are.
Today: the Power Lines photo essay series launches on love, journalism. An accidental archive. Many years of images from around the world. All connected by the same thing running through the frame.
Caucus season above was cold enough to lose feeling in your hands between shots. I was out talking to college students about the race that cycle.
This one has been sitting in an album for years. I was using a basic Kodak bought in a drug store. A few weeks later I’d get my first real camera - a used Pentax K1000 purchased in Katmandu. Next came some serious photography skills.
A far more recent photo from an anniversary roadtrip near Charlottesville. What caught my eye here wasn’t the power lines. It was the fact there’s a sign urging voters to oppose changes to the state’s congressional district maps - a potent political battle that is at the center of the 2026 midterm campaign.
On a recent Baltimore baseball trip just after July 4 I got this shot of one of the more famous sites in Charm City.
Another baseball-themed trip exploring the streets around the Marlins ballpark.
POLITICO let me loose in the spring of 2015 to report out the story of a power plant being built in Mississippi that promised “clean coal” but with a price tag that kept on growing. The technology was ambitious and opposition strong. The nation’s energy markets also didn’t cooperate. It never opened the way it was intended.
A birthday trip amid the pandemic.
Send me yours - power lines, or whatever thing keeps sneaking into your photos uninvited.
A few things percolating, for paying subscribers:
I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is what Sundays look like at love, journalism — a dispatch from the notebook, unfiltered, from whatever year I happened to be living in.
Today’s edition launches a new series from my photo archives — decades of pics from the digital and analog eras. We’re piggybacking as well off my conversation with David Roberts and his career covering the infrastructure of energy to share what I’ve long thought of as my Power Lines series
I stumbled onto my own version of this story a long time ago without knowing it.
Every great shot I tried to take out a car window, driving through the country or across some corner of the world, there was a power line in it. My wife and I used to joke about it. We kept taking pictures and the power lines kept showing up.
Of course they would be there. They always are.
Today: the Power Lines photo essay series launches on love, journalism. An accidental archive. Many years of images from around the world. All connected by the same thing running through the frame.
Caucus season above was cold enough to lose feeling in your hands between shots. I was out talking to college students about the race that cycle.
This one has been sitting in an album for years. I was using a basic Kodak bought in a drug store. A few weeks later I’d get my first real camera - a used Pentax K1000 purchased in Katmandu. Next came some serious photography skills.
A far more recent photo from an anniversary roadtrip near Charlottesville. What caught my eye here wasn’t the power lines. It was the fact there’s a sign urging voters to oppose changes to the state’s congressional district maps - a potent political battle that is at the center of the 2026 midterm campaign.
On a recent Baltimore baseball trip just after July 4 I got this shot of one of the more famous sites in Charm City.
Another baseball-themed trip exploring the streets around the Marlins ballpark.
POLITICO let me loose in the spring of 2015 to report out the story of a power plant being built in Mississippi that promised “clean coal” but with a price tag that kept on growing. The technology was ambitious and opposition strong. The nation’s energy markets also didn’t cooperate. It never opened the way it was intended.
A birthday trip amid the pandemic.
Send me yours - power lines, or whatever thing keeps sneaking into your photos uninvited.
A few things percolating, for paying subscribers:
Small honor worth flagging — the National Press Club Journalism Institute wrote about the burnout-and-recovery arc a lot of you have been reading here, and it’s been landing in some good inboxes. Grateful for that. Please share with your networks if you’re so inclined.
Mark the calendar for Wednesday, August 5 — a live tribute to the E&E News publishing empire of E&E Daily, Greenwire, Land Letter and more — with a run of E&E alumni joining in. More on that soon.
And in the fall, I’m going dark for a while — a Japan trip starting late October that’ll pull me out of the weekly rhythm through Thanksgiving. Best kind of quiet, and I’ll bring plenty back with me.
One more closing item: “Albert Chilling Vanilla" - my latest foray in the visual arts. Or, as the best man at my wedding recently said, he’s loving the Darren “renaissance period.”
#30#