Homage to Gerda Taro

I caught a virus on the weekend, and I am laid low by it, with barely enough energy to cross the room. I made it back to my place and collapsed. For two days I have been sitting with my laptop, slowly and meticulously processing pictures and loving the unique bodies and faces of courageous local activists. In the main photo you see Antonio and Carlos, fierce against the rising tide of fascism in this country, on hand to protect those they love from injustice, from brutality, from white supremacy. They remind me of those who resisted Franco, they remind me of young Gerda Taro, who died triumphant, a camera in her hands. In the extras, a young man whose sweatshirt is newly relevant; and a man in a garment woven, I presume, in northern Africa. He is making a cell phone video, standing dangerously close to a street preacher who predicts hell fire for those who protest the new President, a street preacher who travels with accomplices armed to protect him from imagined foes. It’s a world gone mad, and if I listen to the news I either weep or rage. I escape into the faces and the energetic bodies of these young dreamers.

These photos were processed today, so I’m posting them. This is how I spent my day after reading about an exhibit I would be glad to see, if I were living on the other side of this continent. It shows how photography is part of social change, how photography can not only document, but help to advance the arc of justice. “This exhibition proposes that an ongoing revolution is taking place politically, socially, and technologically, and that new digital methods of image production, display, and distribution are simultaneously both reporting and producing social change.”

There's nothing new in that, I think. It's just Gerda Taro, with a digital camera on Facebook and Instagram.