Microphones appear so frequently in political photography that they often fail to register. They can be clustered and bulbous or they can be thin and sleek—either way, we are trained to look past them.

A few years ago, during the Biden administration, I noticed a mini-genre of Oval Office photographs. They were panned out so you could see the boom mics going up and over the staff and visitors talking on the sofa, making the whole thing look like a high school theatre setup, rigged with conspicuous black metal scaffolding holding lights and such. This was before Biden’s decline had entered its obscene phase, but I still remember thinking this was a subtle visual cue that everything in the Oval Office was theater and props, its figurehead included. With Biden, things were generally old-fashioned and slow, and so the framing seemed like a sign that the photographers or photo editors were slightly bored, wanted to play little postmodern games that revealed the construction of the scene, the apparatus.…