Oakland Women’s March, 2017.
So here’s the thing about photographing a protest: you’re already lying. The minute you lift that camera, you’re making choices about what matters, what’s worth preserving, what truth, if there is such a thing, you’re selling. It’s a hustle, like everything else. But sometimes it’s a hustle worth committing to.
Oakland, March 2017. The streets are thick with bodies and rage and hope and those hand-lettered signs that always break your heart a little because someone actually sat down the night before or that morning with a Sharpie and poster board and tried to compress their entire fucking worldview into three words. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” “My body, my choice.” “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights.” Some clever, some desperate, all sincere in that way that makes you want to look away and also never stop looking.
I’m moving through the crowd with a camera, which means I’m both there and not there. Participating and not participating. Observer and observed. It’s the photographer’s original sin, the distance required to frame the shot is the same distance that keeps you from fully being in the moment. You’re hunting. Always hunting for that intersection of light and meaning, that face that says everything, that gesture that captures what ten thousand words couldn’t.
There’s a woman in a pink hat, of course there’s a woman in a pink hat, there are thousands of them, an entire sea of them, but this one stops me. Something in her eyes. Not anger, exactly. Determination? Exhaustion? Both? The camera doesn’t care about my uncertainty. Click. Move on.
The sound is what they can’t see in these photographs. The chanting that starts somewhere in the middle of the pack and rolls forward and backward like a wave. The drumming. The car horns from drivers stuck in the gridlock who’ve decided fuck it, we’re with you. The helicopters overhead because of course there are helicopters. Authority never sleeps, even when it’s pretending to.
I keep thinking about other marches, other crowds, other cities where people gathered to shout into the void and hope something shouts back. Selma. Stonewall. Tiananmen. Cairo. This isn’t those places, not yet, maybe not ever. But the principle is the same: when you feel powerless, you mass together to remember you’re not alone. It’s tribal. It’s ancient. It’s maybe the only thing we’re actually good at.
A kid on someone’s shoulders, holding a sign she probably can’t even read yet. What is she learning today? That dissent is possible? That her voice matters? Or just that crowds are loud and her parents are tired and this is what Saturday looks like when democracy feels like it’s circling the drain?
The photographs flatten it all. Make it manageable. Digestible. Here’s a face. Here’s a sign. Here’s a moment of solidarity frozen in time. But they can’t capture the smell of too many people in one place, the shuffling of feet, the way your back starts to ache after two hours of standing, the strange electricity that runs through a crowd when everyone simultaneously realizes: we’re a lot of fucking people.
Oakland‘s always been good at this, resistance, noise, showing up when it matters. Something in the DNA of the place, in the ghosts of the Black Panthers and the port strikes and every other time someone said enough. These streets have seen this before. They’ll see it again.
I shoot and shoot and shoot, knowing that most of it won’t matter, that most of these images will get lost in the deluge of everyone else’s images, that the march will be over and Monday will come and then what? But you do it anyway because not doing it feels like surrender. You document because that’s what you have. You bear witness because someone has to.
As the crowd starts to thin, as people peel off toward BART stations and parking garages and whatever comes next. Faces I’ll never see again. Signs that will end up in recycling bins. A day that mattered tremendously and maybe not at all.
Somewhere in these frames I hope there is proof that when things felt darkest, people still showed up. Still made signs. Still believed their presence meant something.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.
William Faulkner
AMAZING!