99 from the 99%: OWS Protraits

"I'm here because property is robbery" (Alexi).
Photograph © August Bradley.

Regular readers will know that my youngest son is named August. Well today I came across this post at Lens featuring the work of another August - August Bradley - who has done this impressive set of portraits of folks at OWS. Bradley's work carries on an emergent tradition of sorts - if two photographers, Joel Sternfeld and Marc Vallée, (with perhaps a nod to Dorothea Lange) can constitute a "tradition." All this work is a creatively appropriates portraiture, a genre that traditionally has been an instrument for the rationalization of elite power.

Marc Vallée

Environmental Protest, Kingsnorth, Kent, 2008.
Photograph © Marc Vallée.

On several occasions I have called attention to reports in The Guardian critical of the abuse of photographers in Britain at the hands of police who have an overly liberal (mis) interpretation of the obscenely overly broad "Terrorism Act 2000." You can find a couple years' worth of my posts on the topic here. In any case, the reports in The Guardian have mostly been penned by Marc Vallée who, it turns out, is himself a photographer and a quite good one at that. Among his long term undertakings - from which I lifted the image above - is a political protest project. In some ways many of the images in that project bring to mind the portraits Joel Sternfeld did of protesters at the G8 meetings in Genoa in 2001. I've commented on that work here. Photographers like Vallée perform a crucially important and often quite dangerous task by making visible struggles over the public space necessary to any plausible conception of political freedom.