The election season is upon us. And that means only one thing: Hillary Clinton will be topic #1 across the nation for at least the next year. We will be saturated by Hillary news.
Bloggers, pundits, journalists, satirists and Photoshoppers are going to need a steady stream of Hillary images to illustrate their postings and stories over the upcoming campaign season. And if you're not exactly a Hillary fan, you're going to want unflattering pictures of her.
But where to find them? The mainstream media, for the most part, tends to only publish their "best" photos of her -- pictures that make her look good. As a result, awkward, funny, strange, and patently ridiculous candid photos of Hillary can be a little hard to come across.
Until now.
As a public service, zombietime has compiled this gallery of unflattering Hillary photos. And I will maintain it and continue to expand it at least until the conclusion of the presidential election in November, 2008. The photos on this page come from a wide variety of sources -- from personal snapshots, to historical archives, to standard mainstream news photos.
The purpose of this gallery is not as entertainment itself, but rather to serve as a resource for bloggers, journalists, satirists and so on to find and re-use the Hillary photos of their choice. So feel free to download any of the pictures you see here to your own hard drive, and re-use them however you see fit. Come back again and again whenever you need a new unsightly photo of Hillary! (As for how to download a picture from a Web page to your computer: there are a variety of simple techniques, depending on your browser and operating system. In many cases you can simply drag the image to your computer desktop or hard drive icon; or you can alt-click or control-click the image and select "Save image to..." or "Download image.")
Is this "fair"? Is it mature, impartial and reasoned? Of course not. But this is politics, after all. My goal is to puncture the perfectly-honed public image of Hillary maintained by her campaign staff, and undermine any attempts to control the public perception of her.
Since this page first went online, I have received many emails from Hillary supporters who take great offense at the existence of this gallery and who express their displeasure in a variety of ways, either by insulting me, or questioning the purpose of uploading these images at all. To which I say: It is what it is. Deal with it. The gallery isn't going anywhere. The last I heard, there was no law against making fun of politicians.
Another common strategy of Hillary supporters is to claim an increased admiration for and attraction to Hillary based on these photos. Which is perfectly fine by me -- there is no prescribed proper emotional response to the Hillary Gallery, and if it only serves to increase your sympathy and love for her, then that is your prerogative.
Yes, perhaps it would be more "meaningful" for me to analyze her policy positions, and discuss her political strategies, and expend a lot of verbiage assessing whether or not she'd make a good president. But there are literally thousands of other Web pages devoted to those exact pursuits, and there is no need for another one. That angle's already covered. What no one has done (at least until I put this page online) is focus on the purely visual aspect of Hillary. That's all the Gallery aspires to do, and has no pretensions to be anything more.
And lastly, for the conspiracy theorists: I am not a Republican operative (or even a Republican at all, for that matter), nor do I work for the Obama campaign, nor the Giuliani campaign, nor any other campaign or political organization. The Really Truly Hillary Gallery is completely independent, nonprofit and non-partisan.
If you know of any additional unflattering images of Hillary Clinton not visible on this page, I encourage you to email me either a link to the image online, or the actual image file itself. MAKE SURE YOU VIEW THIS ENTIRE PAGE BEFORE SUBMITTING NEW IMAGES. I do not want to keep getting repeat submissions of the same picture.
And also, keep in mind that this gallery is only for authentic, unaltered, real photos of Hillary Clinton. DO NOT SUBMIT PHOTOSHOPS, drawings, satires, montages, or any image that is not an actual, natural photo of Hillary. Any such submissions will not be posted here.
So -- start downloading! Any questions or suggestions can be sent to the email address above.
(Thanks to the following people for submitting photos used on this page: insanity police, Jammie Wearing Fool, Ringo the Gringo, jcm, Killgore Trout, Thanos, lawhawk, uncle_monkey, Stuck-in-CA, Ed M., NYNana, Carl in Jerusalem, Val C. mama winger, Perry M., Jonathan C., David S., SeafoodGumbo, JK, gene, Chanoc, badboy, toni, Gabe A., Nathan P., Happy Carrington, Miranda, Jim H., Greg P., dentet, Jeanne, Victoria V., eLoser, Vivian, Monica S., Bruce B., gp holmes, Damian G., abu lahab, Ben W., Taylor F., Nathan P., Zachary Y., Kimberly., Rhonda B., D.P.M., Robert D., Trever, Dave, Pasquale P.)
The "devil picture" may look suspect, but it's real; it was taken at an Ohio high school where the school team is called "The Blue Devils"; the photo was released by Reuters.
These two pictures, as well as the two pictures below, were taken at Hillary's victory party for the New Hampshire primary in January of 2008.
These images are TV freezeframes of Hillary at a campaign event broadcast in January of 2008.
This recent photo was taken on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in December of 2007.
After extensive research, I determined that the above photo, which I originally thought might have been "too good to be true" and perhaps digitally altered in some way, is actually an authentic photo of Hillary Clinton, released by the Associated Press on March 30, 2007. The original can be found on an official Associated Press web page here, bearing this caption: "Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York reacts to seeing and [sic] old friend during a campaign stop at the National Education Association New Hampshire, in Concord, N.H., Friday, March 30, 2007. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)." The same photo with an Associated Press watermark can be found here. It was also reproduced untampered-with on various blogs -- even pro-Hillary blogs, such as this one -- in the following days. I also have found no evidence that it has been Photoshopped in any way, which can only lead me to conclude that the photo is authentic.
This photo is authentic, although there are various other versions of it in which the contrast and saturation have been altered to further distort her face.
I'm not sure which of these two versions of the same photo is closer to the original. The one on the left is more complete, but it also seems to have possibly been "sharpened" digitally; alternately, the one on the left is the original, and the one on the right is a low-resolution copy.
The above photo is unaltered, but beware that there is a subtly Photoshopped version of it floating around the web in which her teeth have been slightly enlarged.
Given the current crop of rumors that Hillary might be gay, the above photo has been questioned as possibly being faked. However, it is unquestionably real, since someone videotaped the event where the photo was taken. The image comes from March 8, 2000, at a speech by Hillary to the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. The video of the event can be viewed here, and for confirmation I've posted a screenshot from that video here, which shows the same moment but from a different angle.
The following pictures of Hillary are, to me, not particularly unflattering -- but I've posted them here either because they're very rare and little-seen, or because they're funny in some way or another. I've also included a few famous pictures in this section simply because people keep submitting them to me, saying I've missed a classic; and even though I don't think they merit inclusion in the main gallery, I'll post them in this addendum merely to stop people from sending them to me over and over.
And now, presenting the not-so-unflattering gallery rejects...
These were sent in by someone who went to school with Hillary, with the note, "From my 1964 high school year book and newspaper," though the photo on the right seems to show Hillary at a slightly younger age. Note that Hillary was on the "Cultural Values committee."
The famous shot shows a soldier who crossed his fingers when he shook Hillary's hand.
And the two most controversial pictures of all, both of which actually do count as "sexist," and as such are ineligible for the main gallery: on the left, the only known "upskirt" picture of Hillary, taken sometime probably in the '80s; and on the right, a photo of her with rather elephantine legs. People: please stop sending me these photos!
These two pictures (which were the original inspiration for this page) are both low-resolution outtakes of photos I took of Hillary at a campaign appearance in Oakland on September 30, 2007. Have you ever taken similar snapshots of Hillary but never used them because they just didn't "look right"? If so, dig them out and send them to me here.
Someone took 32 of the pictures off this page and combined them into an unflattering Hillary mosaic -- which I'll present here for easy download for those who want as many Hillary pictures as possible in one handy package.
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