2020 may have been the year of protests here in Louisville but we've not lacked for them in the years since. I've found myself at a few of them and managed to accumulate more than a few protest photos in that time.
Thing is, after I've posted a few and written about them a time or two it starts to seem eerily akin to beating a dead horse. How many times can you say the same thing differently?
What do you do with a bunch of protest photos and nothing to say? All-you-can-protest buffet! A few from this protest, a little from that one and before long you've got something for everyone.
Well, maybe not, but these are a selection from a range of protests over the past three years. How has it been that long since 2020 already?
When I started taking photos at protests I had no clue what I was doing and still mostly don't. That's never been much of an impediment, it's when you think you know what you're doing that you need to worry.
Protests can be tricky to shoot, both from the heightened emotions that tend to come with a protest as well as the limited number of good angles you have to work with. There's always so much going on, so there's always an element of luck to being in the right place at the right time.
Marches especially, everything is in motion and you're either sprinting ahead to get a shot of it coming towards you or looking for an elevated position, or trying not to get run over as you shoot closeups.
The newsies tend to stick to the periphery of a protest but I like to shoot from smack dab in the middle of them. You get a lot more photos of people's backs that way but it gives you a better perspective as to what it is like to participate in something like that.
No matter what the protest is about, there's almost always at least one person there who didn't get the memo and is doing their own thing.
You don't really want to encourage them but they're usually something to see and shoot. This guy was at a voting rights march in DC after Trump was already out of office. Speaking of the dotard, he's got a Supreme Court case pending that's just about guaranteed to outrage half the country no matter how it goes, anybody want to make book on the outcome?
Y'all remember the boogaloo bois? They were all the rage in 2020 and then suddenly it was like they returned to the woodwork from whence they'd sprang. Doesn't seem suspicious at all. Can't say that I'll miss their Hawaiian print and AR-15 motif but I can't help but wonder what they're up to these days.
Still don't know how I overlooked this on my first pass. Fun fact: In Kentucky the legal age of consent is 16 but thanks to a law they passed last year over the governor's veto kids have to be 18 to get gender affirming care.
Protests, particularly marches, tend to involve plenty of chants, lots of call and response. Snapping a shot mid-chant is a great way to get lots of fun expressions.
It's just about closing time for the buffet so that's probably enough photos. *Until next time, march on!