I’ve added a new story to my website, and it’s a subject I’ve been trying to cover for nearly 8 years! And for the first time, I’ve used a little video and animated gifs.
For Bloomberg Businessweek, I photographed how exactly 100,000 balloons are dropped on the final night of American political conventions.
The balloon drops at almost every Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention in the last four decades have been the work of Treb Heining, a man who has a claim to creating the entire balloon decorating industry.
Treb led a crew of balloon professionals and local volunteers as they inflated and tied, by hand over the course of three days, approximately 100,000 balloons to be mounted in the ceiling and dropped on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Big thanks to Jane Yeomans and Aeriel Brown for taking my pitch (twice!) and helping make this project a reality.
Here’s the story: One hundred thousand balloons.