The Vigorous Democracy

having grown up in the Portland area, i have been attending, or observing protests since i was about 15 years old. But i had never been interested in photography until about two years ago. I arrived home from work on November 8th at about 11pm and turned on my tv to see the elction results. Knowing the activist culture in Portland, i knew i had only a small window of time to get batteries charged, gear in my bag, and pick up a buddy to keep an eye out for me so i could focus on the job in what was guaranteed to be a mess of noise, sweat, blood, tear gas and pepper spray. I don't think anybody truly expected the election to turn out the way it did, myself included. That being said, i hadn't put much thought into how i was going to photograph the protest (that i wasn't expecting). The one thing i had considered is that there was no way i was going to do anything i had seen before. I'm not a completely normal person and i hold myself accountable to make my photos the way i see them. What i ended up with was a speedlight, mounted on the end of a mono-pod, with a wireless trigger attached to it, and a plastic dome light fixture from the hallway in my house taped over the flash to spread the light as wide as i could to catch the background, while still keeping the subject prominent. i shot everything with a broken sigma 14mm f3.5 because i wanted my shots to be closer to everything than anyone else was going to be, and because i got it for 10 dollars on craigslist and i can't afford to replace any of my other lenses. Artistically my goal was to shoot the most interesting people i could find, with a big bright light over head so that i could showcase each person as if i had somehow frozen time and put a spotlight on just that one person out of thousands. I wanted to show the stark, uncompromising individuality of the people in Portland rather than just show the reason they were there in the first place. I was tear gassed, pepper sprayed, hit with a baton, knocked over in a stampede, and my camera was destroyed (impressively the $10 lens survived, kudos to sigma). After all was said and done, the mission was accomplished, i got my shots, and they were as close to my vision as i could hope to achieve given the circumstances. And it only took 3 months of working a side job as a dishwasher to get a new camera.