{"id":36549,"date":"2020-07-14T10:46:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-14T10:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artzealous.com\/?p=36549"},"modified":"2020-07-18T11:24:36","modified_gmt":"2020-07-18T11:24:36","slug":"photographing-protests-through-a-prism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/photographing-protests-through-a-prism\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographing Protests Through a Prism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
“Photographing Black Lives Matter vigils through light-bending prisms helped me create radically gentle images of protestors and reflect on my own implicit bias.”<\/em> As a visual journalist, I\u2019ve covered identity politics for five years. I\u2019ve developed a strong muscle for bringing cameras into tense situations. I\u2019ve sat through mandatory corporate workshops covering expectations of privacy<\/a> in journalism, and I\u2019ve had no moral quandaries over snapping photos in public places. Still, bringing my camera to the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City in June of 2020 made me feel uneasy. At face value, New York City had yet to start reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and an 8pm curfew had been instituted after multiple nights of vandalism and police clashing with protestors. On a deeper level, I was concerned that as a white woman, it wasn\u2019t my place to take photos of Black people mourning Black lives lost to police and systemic brutality. I was also constantly, validly being reminded through Journalist Instagram (maybe you\u2019re a part of Teacher Instagram or Nurse Instagram or some other niche online space) that gatekeepers for Black stories have historically been white<\/a> and the question of if it could cause harm<\/a> to publish photos of protestors. Before I brought my camera to a protest, I wanted to consider how I was capturing these photos and why I felt inclined to photograph protests.\u00a0
Images and text by Emily Geraghty.
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