BallotVox

The Crowd at the Inauguration Concert

Some 400,000+ people squeezed onto the Mall for yesterday’s inauguration-kick-off concert. They stretched close to a mile from the base of the Washington Monument all the way to the president-elect’s VIP box at the Lincoln Memorial. By this morning, those many people had put up roughly a gazillion photos of what it looked like from inside the crowd.

Software engineer Ryan Guthridge took a wonderfully layered (in meaning and depth of focus) black-and-white:

[mister r / Flickr]

Victor Guerrero from Centerville, Virginia — also a software engineer — said, “Never seen so many people in my life in one place.” He “tried to capture” the crowd at the far end of the Mall but feels his picture “is nothing compared to being there.”

[cerotio / Flickr]

RRCarroll, also near the Monument, turned the other way to catch the sweep of the crowd down towards the stage.

[RRCarroll / Flickr]

Jqblue, somewhere in the middle of the pack along the reflecting pool, looked back at the Monument:

[jqblue / Flickr]

Sarah Mick is taking a break from making music to study advertising and graphic design in Milwaukee. She says she arrived at the concert “several hours early” but only got this close to the stage:

[sarahmick / Flickr]

One real advantage to being in the thick of it on an icy day: body heat.