It has been so interesting going down to the Embaracadero to take pictures at Occupy San Francisco. When I was at a workshop in Buenos Aires this summer, I showed my portfolio from my work-in-progress documentary project on street kids and substance abuse to a photographer whose work I really admire. We didn’t have much time together, but when I emailed her to thank her for giving me feedback on my work, she sent me a long response in which she explained her own beliefs and observations of the particular demographic of people I have been working with for the past year. She said she believed that we are going to be seeing more and more of this, a new generation of kids who have little or nothing left to believe in, where the old equations of so-called happiness and success are falling apart right before our eyes, and where the dissolution of our sense of security in our homes and our cars our marriages and our retirement and insurance funds will force more and more young people out into the street. I had been worried my project wasn’t “current” enough, but it turns out it couldn’t be more relevant to these times of great upheaval.
Fast forward a couple of months and look at what’s going on in major cities across the world-- probably the greatest movement of global resistance against the powers-that-be since the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the sixties. I have been taking portraits of occupiers at the Embarcadero encampment, and last Wednesday, when I entered the scene I found that a group of about 100 UC Berkeley students had somehow managed to break into the Bank of America building, set up a tent inside, and sit on the floor by the window while the riot police came in and arrested them one by one. I was pretty delighted to see a tent pitched in the Bank of America building, I must admit. Outside the police were lined up like storm troopers, trying to remain professional in their stoicism while a couple of the protesters shouted at them in their faces the same things over and over again:
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? How can you go home to your families tonight knowing that you did what you did? Do you want to shoot us? Go ahead and shoot us! How can you live with yourselves?”
What exactly what it was this particular group of police officers had done or were doing that was so upsetting? Beyond standing around?! I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself listening to these comments, and I started moving up and down the front line, trying to make goofy faces at the police officers to get them to crack a smile. Most of them continued to stare off into space, but I did elicit a smile from a few of them who I think could appreciate the absurdity of the situation they found themselves in. While I understand the rage that many of the occupiers feel towards the system, as I have felt it in my own life towards those who I’ve felt have wanted to stifle my freedom, I found many of these comments to be slightly ridiculous. For me, this movement is about taking back the democratic ideals of freedom, freedom to live the lives we choose to live, whether that involves being a police officer or living on the street in a tent. I am growing weary of the whole “with us or against us” mentality of some of the more vocal members of this movement. In fact, I find it amusing that those who were trying to blame and shame these police officers into “agreeing” with them are really doing the same thing that the capitalist systems have been trying to do to us for as long as they have been around—shame people into conformity—and whether that’s conformity to the establishment or the anti-establishment, does it really matter? Aren’t we really all in this together?
The evening ended peacefully, and it got me thinking a lot about what this movement is about for me: learning to see, as much as possible from where we stand, those around us as human, from the lowly police officer "just following orders" in order to feed his family to the infuriated college student who can't afford to pay his college tuition to the junkie who needs a place to pitch his tent. We are all just doing what we think is the best for ourselves. Indeed, that is what photography is about for me, and the more I approach the challenging situations I put myself in with curiosity, the greater my love--and my sense of absurdity--of my life and this planet and this race deepen.
