The January 6 Photo That Knew
Among hundreds of images documenting the Capitol attack, Balazs Gardi captured something different: a moment of quiet triumph that seemed premature then, but prophetic now.
On the 5th anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s insurrectionists, I would like to highlight a photo from that day that stands apart. Taken by documentary photographer Balazs Gardi, it was shortlisted for the 2025 Prix Pictet, one of the world’s leading awards for photography and sustainability.
Unlike most historical documentation that captures a moment and recedes into the archive, this image has proven disturbingly prescient—its significance not diminishing with time but intensifying, as if it foresaw the continuing political turbulence and democratic fragility—an oracle of our current despair.
Most January 6 imagery documents a harrowing attack that was ultimately repelled. Gardi’s photo frames the event differently. As a portrait rather than an action shot, it possesses an eerie quietness, an assuredness, even a solemnity that sets it apart. Where other photographs show pepper-spray clouds, hand-to-hand combat, shattered glass—this image presents something more unsettling: a moment of stillness that reads almost as an anointment.
At the center stands a figure dressed in Revolutionary War regalia, framed in a heroic pose that immediately evokes Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The composition is strikingly similar—a central figure in period costume, surrounded by compatriots, captured at what the image itself insists is a historic turning point. But where Leutze painted the founding of American democracy, Gardi has photographed what now appears to be the rehearsal for its unmaking. The revolutionary costume isn’t cosplay or irony—in this frame, it reads as a genuine claim, a declaration that this moment, this movement, represents the true inheritors of 1776.
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Behind the figures looms the Capitol dome, shrouded in scaffolding. That scaffolding—meant for restoration and preservation—takes on devastating symbolic weight. The building appears wounded, vulnerable, literally under reconstruction. It’s as if the photograph captured the republic itself in a state of incompletion, its protective shell removed, exposed to those who would remake it in their own image.
The trappings are all there: the triumphant postures, the sense of historical inevitability, the quiet confidence of those who believe they’ve already won. And they may not have been wrong. While the government didn’t fall on January 6, 2021, the victory this photograph depicts is being realized. Trump was reelected. Congress, thus far, at least, has been neutralized. Constitutional constraints have been disregarded with impunity.
What seemed like a failed attempt may have been the turning point—and Gardi’s lens somehow knew it.
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