As the threat from Covid-19 receded in the fall of 2021, I took to the streets again with my old Leica cameras and black and white film, to document rallies and demonstrations. I didn’t have to wait very long until the political landscape was roiled by a series of events, one after the other.
Abortion Rights: My first project involved abortion, or rather the judicial threats to safe, legal abortions. These protests sprang up following the Supreme Court decision in the fall of 2021 to hear arguments for overturning Roe v. Wade, which had kept abortion legal in the U.S. for nearly a half- century. This became the first of the causes that I covered in NYC for my return to politically-oriented street photography. I documented the rallies and protests that took place both before and after the momentous June 2022 decision that upended abortion access in nearly half of the states.
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Iranian Women: Not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a crisis erupted in Iran that had resonances in New York. A young woman named Masah Amini was arrested by the morals police in Tehran and died as a result. The demonstrations that broke out across Iran in the wake of her death were brutally suppressed. The international protest movement called itself Woman Life Freedom, and Iranian expats and their supporters in New York, demonstrated on a regular basis in Washington Square Park, in front of the United Nations and elsewhere in the city, in attempts to raise awareness about the oppression of women in Iran.
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War in Ukraine: Between my two other projects, in February of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. There had been signs of impending war for months, with Russian troops and armor massed on the borders with Ukraine, but somehow a land war in Europe was still unimaginable after the nearly eight decades of relative peace since the end of World War II. Ukraine was expected to be defeated as soon as the Russians invaded, but despite being outgunned and outnumbered – and with the assistance of the United States and (to varying degrees) Europe, the Ukrainians were able to hold their own. I photographed many of the rallies for Ukraine that took place in the city, until they began to diminish after the first year of the war. As of this writing, in early 2025, the future is looking increasingly bleak for Ukraine.
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I prefer not to think of myself as a documenter of lost causes, but things aren’t looking so promising for any of the three causes that I’ve been covering for the past several years. I hope that time proves me wrong.