Artist Statement

My activism photojournalism is my homage to activism’s passions and iconography. It supports, celebrates, and amplifies activism. It also wants to participate and contribute to activism’s contemporary causes. It is sympathetic to activism’s messages competing in noisy spaces for the attention of a busy, distracted, cloistered audience — an audience occupied by the urgent clutter of personal lives. And it recognizes when the activist feels isolated, discouraged, and not effective enough. Activism instinctively creates iconography as pithy visual shorthand for its punch lines and branding; e.g. “No Justice No Peace”. And it is communicating live, in real time, on the streets. That makes it a great photojournalism subject and makes photojournalism activism’s ally. 

OUR STATEMENT [The exhibition's Statement]

“We the People, in Order to Form a More Perfect Union”… from the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, 1787, Philadelphia

Living and Photographing in an Imperfect Union

We came up with this theme after the November election, which triggered fear about the future
among so many artists. In this time of unmitigated chaos, the threat is real. We can only do what we can do…some of us create art. The photographers here have shown us through various ways of image-making, that their minds and hearts have grappled with this new reality and produced myriad ways of dealing with it. We need to continue. Please don’t stop.

[The above is the introduction to the exhibition's Statement.  Click here to jump to the online exhibition, read the complete statement, and view all the images in the online gallery of juried and awarded images.]