The Occupiers
Portraits from Zuccotti Park, the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement
During October and November of 2011 I visited Zuccotti Park several times and built a portrait studio in the square to capture the faces of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. When I first visited I was shocked at the discrepancy between what I had seen in the media and internet and the reality that I witnessed firsthand there. Rather than the ragtag band of malcontents seen on televison news I found a diverse community of people expressing the belief that our country had lost its way and that the current system was corrupted and in bad need of change. It was far more organized than I had been led to believe as well and I felt that the protestors were not receiving a just or fair representation in the popular media. I set out to document a catalogue of the true face of the movement in the hopes that people would see these portraits and recognize the faces therein as not being disimilar to themselves. It was my hope that by taking them out of the context of the park and protest, stripping all of the background noise out of the signal it would force people to confront the protestors for what they are: human. What you see here is simply a gathering of Americans expressing their dissatisfaction with a system that they perceive as having become antithetical to the principles that America was founded on.
