Work in Progess: Faces in The Crowd

April 7, 2009

Anonymous Scientology Protest, 2007

Following up on my previous post questioning the tendency of press photographers to focus on violent protestors I’ll present my own work around protests I’ve photographed over the years.   I don’t have the dedication that Fred Askew (his site is well worth spending some time paging through) has shown in covering protest in NYC but I have a small stack of negatives to draw images from.

My own approach is to use a normal or portrait lens to focus on individuals within the crowd.   Some of the protests in the lead up to the Iraqi war pulled in hundreds of thousands of protestors.  As time went on the hundreds of thousands dwindled down to tends of thousands and as the war dragged on only a few groups kept up vigils of a dozen or so protestors who kept at it despite the media fatigue.

Speaking out during the RNC, Union Square

During the most recent March on Wall Street I took my newly repaired (and now perfectly accurate) Voigtlander Bessa R3A which I have only been able to afford a quite spiffy but slightly wide 40mm lens for.   This made things a bit more difficult as I was used to the 85mm portrait lens I use on my Canon T-90.  I either had to get a bit closer to people than I’m used to or I had to find a way to visually isolate them so they stood out from the rest of the crowd.

Woman with Pig Painting, Wall Street

A crowd of 10,000 is still 10,000 individuals who decided for their own reasons to get up, get dressed, and haul themselves out to wherever it is the other 9,999 people were planning on showing up.  I think they deserve a little attention.

You can view a number of my other photos from the March on Wall Street on my flickr stream.

Posted in Photo Projects