The final Saturday Night Live before the midterm elections on November 8 couldn’t find much to say about the dire political situation unfolding in races across the country. The shoulder shrug of a cold open suggested that Democrats might do better in the polls if they found wild characters—such as Guy Fieri and Azealia Banks—to run for office and compete with similarly outrageous personalities on the Republican ticket.

I started out as a writer in the early 1990s, before the internet was important. I existed for a long while without a social-media profile, let alone a website to promote my brand. Then—it was about 2009 or so—I was strongly encouraged by my publicist to join the 21st century. I had an opportunity to expose my work to new generations of readers! I thought, Why yes, I would like to do that.

Adrienne Rich, or at least the version of her that people typically remember, was never resigned to the status quo. By the time of her death in 2012, she’d become a feminist leader, an antiwar advocate, and a poet who wrote boldly about politics, human rights, and sexuality. She had vowed to not pay her taxes in protest of the Vietnam War, and she refused a National Medal of Arts, criticizing political leaders.

Political photographs are deceptive things. They are caught in the middle of the action, the spin of a campaign or backstory, and offer subtle nods to larger currents in our country’s history. Often, if you listen carefully to these images, you’ll hear hints of an American tension: the call for more rights and freedom, and the simultaneous, equally loud cry for exclusion based on differences—and for a compromised version of our participatory democracy.

This article was originally published in High Country News.From the top of Pigeon Butte in western Oregon’s William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, the full width of the Willamette Valley fits into a gaze. Slung between the Coast Range and the Cascades, the valley is checkered with farmland: grass-seed fields, hazelnut orchards, vineyards. In the foreground, however, grassy meadows scattered with wildflowers and occasional oaks trace the land’s contours.

PHILADELPHIA—Outside the basketball arena at Temple University, a long line of anxious Democrats contemplated their party’s possibly bleak political future, as a brass band played Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”That strange juxtaposition of dread and joy seemed to be the theme of Saturday afternoon’s rally at the Liacouras Center.