These portraits were taken in October/November of 2011 in Zuccotti Square during the Occupy Wall Street protest. I built a portrait studio there to try to capture the diversity of people and opinions that the movement is composed of. I did this primarily in reaction the stark contrast that I saw between the image represented on the news and my own experience when I visited the square for the first time. I felt that a formal portrait setting, devoid of the context of the park and the protests, would allow the viewer to see the protestors on a more human level and hopefully to see them not as a fringe element but simply as people that they might recognize from their own communities. Over the course of 7 day long visits to the square I shot 200 portraits and this selection is a tiny fraction of the diverse group of voices that had come together in downtown Manhattan to air their grievances against an economic system that they viewed as being unfair and antithetical to the values of America.
