I was totally unable to look away, but terrified to look towards. I was stuck mid-scroll on Instagram, on this photo of Black bodies, doing what I ‘d seen our ancestors perform in the face of injustice. This time, they were marching in the streets, opposing the killing of George Floyd and the limitless authorities brutality prior to him. But this photo was various. It didn’t have the pieces that struck the chords of the protests in the ’60 s and even the demonstrations and riots in ’92 after the beating of Rodney King.
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Brent Lewis is a picture editor based in New York City and the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a platform dedicated to showcasing the work of BIPOC photographers and offering editors with the resources to find talent that they may have missed out on.
The picture, from a photographer I follow in New york city City, had a bar across the eyes of a protester, blurring his facial functions. It got rid of the humankind of somebody wishing to be seen and have his frustrations heard and turned them into a faceless Black body. A Black body with that exact same body movement of vexation and anxiety, but nothing to humanize those feelings. Absolutely nothing to assist connect them to somebody who maybe didn’t understand why he was out there or who may have been there simply to have some familiarity with the Black existence in general. It terrified the hell out of me. Not for my own sake, but for how images like these would be perceived in the wider lens of America. Which was even prior to I put on my journalistic hat.
For the last month, a little however singing portion of the web has actually been calling for photographers covering the demonstrations to blur or not show the faces of protesters, over safety issues. This subset, which was stunning to me, isn’t really comprised of protesters. It started when some Twitter users called out the fact that a number of protesters featured in recognizable pictures in 2016 had since passed away in doubtful scenarios, or had actually disappeared. Soon after, the call to blur faces and hide the identities began turning up throughout social media(a great deal of these commenters were younger and seemingly more ally than protester). These commenters don’t appear to comprehend the ethics of journalism, the power of the images, nor do they totally get the significance of these protests in the larger context that they play in the story of Black individuals rising up in this nation. Yet, with the ability to spread info and a lot of non-photojournalists trying to find info in addition to feeling the pressure from previously discussed groups online, it started to take place.
A quick search on blurring photos of protesters will raise a bunch of articles from outlets like TechCrunch, Mashable, Popular Science, The Edge, a
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