Initially, I started photographing protests because I was interested in the use of the environment by protesters and police and how they used and modified spaces and features of the urban landscape in ways that were not intended by the urban planners and designers of these spaces. In my mind, it was a sort of documentary project. However, once word got out about vindictive police going to great lengths to identify and subsequently arrest individual protesters, the editing process took a turn for the surreal. Blurring out, hiding peoples faces didn't jive with the overall feel of the imagery I had captured. It was a band-aid lacking in nuance that distracted from the photograph itself. After experimenting with various possible solutions, I decided to double down on one that hid individual faces and modified parts of the background, creating a surreal situation. While it may be difficult to call this is a documentary project anymore because the images diverge from any kind of reality, the surreal intrusions remind us that until the powers that be can accept the expression of diverse ideas without threatening retaliation, the progressive and the surreal may continue to go hand in hand.

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About

After growing up overseas in Central and South America, I settled in the DC area to attend college, where I took my first photo class. Coming out of that, I set myself on the very narrow focus of urban night photography, often staying out until the last train home. Although that is no longer my mainstay, its lessons have been carried forward in examining topics in the built environment, including Brutalist architecture, graffiti, and more recently investigating urban infrastructure's impact on how and where people choose to protest. More technically, this is effectively developing a psychogeographical map of the city as the protester sees it. Where they gather, march to and from, where they can rest or buy food and snacks, and where they go after the days' events.