"There's Not So Many of You..."

Showing up in a Capitol Hill committee room to testify a few days ago, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner seemed surprised to find only two photographers waiting for him.

"There's not so many of you," he said. "The economy must be getting better."

A nice insight - but possibly not the real reason for the low press turnout. The secretary was testifying on dull budget matters, while in another hearing room a CEO named Toyoda was struggling to explain faulty accelerator pedals.

How many photos?

"How many photos do you take?" people ask me when I'm working.

"A lot," I usually say. "It's the secret of professional photography: Take a lot of pictures, and something is bound to turn out."

Well, maybe not. But I do shoot a lot of photos, perhaps a couple hundred at an assignment that only lasts an hour or two. And judging by the sounds of their cameras, some of my colleagues shoot even more.

Usually all the unused images languish in my archive, with me occasionally finding the need to go back and pull one. But, with the magic of laptop movie-making, they can also now be made into a movie. And it can be a darn good movie -- at least when the subject is our highly expressive Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner (see "Yes, he can"), appearing before the House Financial Services Committee.

Geithner, the Movie from Jay Mallin on Vimeo.

That's a lot of Congressmen

Well, how would you react if you were called to testify before the combined membership of the House Financial Services and Agriculture Committees - more than 100 members of Congress in all, or about one-quarter of the full House of Representatives.

Yes, he can

Back in January I noted how well-suited former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was to a time of economic crisis — at least in terms of his facial expressions (See "Farewell to the Bald Guy"). And, since I regularly put in time photographing Treasury secretaries, I wondered how well his successor, Tim Geithner, would do on that front. What if we got a secretary incapable of anything but bland expressions and limited gestures?

Following a pair of hearings with Mr. Geithner, I can report my situation was like that of many comics at the end of the Bush administration. They were concerned that the last president's departure would leave them without material. And they, like me, need not have worried.

Farewell to the Bald Guy

"The Bald Guy" — that's how my sons refer to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, whom I've been assigned to photograph often over the last 2 1/2 years, first in relative obscurity, then in anything but (see "Page 1" from this past fall).

Economists and politicians will debate whether Mr. Paulson responded appropriately to the economy's sudden unraveling, though he certainly moved quickly and modified his views on the free market in the process. But I can say for certain his range of facial expressions was well-suited to a time of economic crisis.

Yesterday, probably the last time I'll photograph Mr. Paulson as Treasury secretary, he was speaking not about troubled assets and frozen credit but about climate change. That's only the second time I remember hearing a cabinet-level Bush administration official talk on the subject. (The other time the secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, was discussing the decision to list polar bears as threatened because polar ice is melting - but he insisted there is no causal link between the melting ice and CO2 emissions in the lower 48 states. I found this a little hard to follow.)

So it might seem an odd subject for Time magazine's runner-up as Person of the Year to give a valedictory on. But not for Mr. Paulson - a dedicated birder, his enviro credentials include chairing the board of the Nature Conservancy and leading Goldman Sachs (where he was chairman before moving to Treasury) to take environmental positions that are well ahead of most businesses, and certainly ahead of the administration he's served.

Yesterday Mr. Paulson refused to be drawn into any criticism of the administration's record on climate change, joking he'd made it 2 1/2 years without going off-message and that he was not about to derail with only eight days left. So here's hoping the "Bald Guy" does well in his next gig, hopefully one where he can speak his mind more freely.