Ever notice how the news always seems to focus on the same people time and again? Over and over, it's the same VIPs and experts being quoted and interviewed. With as much time as they spend doing that it kinda makes you wonder how much they actually accomplish themselves.
History has the same tendency, the 'great men' get all the pages and the grunts are lucky to be a footnote. No man is an island, so how much can any one individual be responsible for?
Furthermore, what sort of message does that send? Who benefits from this?
When I first started taking photos at protests I would occasionally imitate the press and snap photos of the VIPs and the like. To say I'm less than impressed with those photos would probably be an overstatement. It took me a while to pin down why exactly I was dissatisfied with them but eventually it hit me. The significance of the photos stems from the presence of a VIP. Neat. Aside from saying 'I was there' the photos really weren't saying much of nothing.
Once I got over all that I started paying much more attention to the people around me and that proved to be much more interesting and rewarding. These were the people doing the work day in and day out, and they also made for much better photo subjects than the ones that just drop in for the photo op.
Photos are all from the March On For Voting Rights in Washington DC on August 28, 2021.