On election night 2008, photojournalist Matt Mendelsohn went to the Lincoln Memorial and took a picture of the people gathered there -- the quiet moment the photograph captures is almost impossible to imagine now, given the nation’s current politics.

Mendelsohn’s photograph eventually came into the hands of Congressman John Lewis, who gave a copy of it to President Obama as an inauguration present. The picture hung outside Obama’s White House office for the next eight years.

In this radio diary, Mendelsohn tells us how this photo came to be.