Elena Kaplan ~ Politics In Her Blood

When my daughter Elena was young she always wanted to go everyplace with me. She never called me "Father", nor would she use the familiar "Al" like my friends did. To her I was always "Alan".

One day when she was about 5 or 6 President Jimmy Carter was speaking here in North Miami at the community center, and Elena went with me. I remember that the Secret Service guys really examined one of my Leica bodies that was equipped with a Visoflex II reflex housing and a big fat 150mm f/2.3 Astro Pan Tachar lens. I guess that if it didn't look like a Nikon F it MUST be a weapon. Anyway, after removing the lens from the Visoflex and letting them look through it, they let me use it.

Motion picture lenses, like the Astro Pan Tachar, have the smoothest bokeh, so a cut from using one lens to another is less jarring on screen. The shot of Carter was with that lens. Out of focus in the background is Mayor Howard Neu. The shot of Elena was from her campagn website when she ran for district 58 in the Georgia House of Representatives. I have no idea who shot it bu I like the photo.

After Carter finished speaking he posed for the typical shaking hands shots with about anybody who wanted to, but this was a few years before I decided that I may as well get a shot with me too. One person Carter did want to get a shot with was Elena. He got down on one knee and beckoned her to come sit on his other knee. She had a thing about grey haired older men. She didn't want anything to do with them. She was truely terrified! Try as we might we couldn't convince her to dry her tears and sit on Carter's knee. Here we are 30 years later and I bet she'd just love to have had a picture of Jimmy Carter and herself for her brochures and website in her run for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.