Protesters converge in DC for march against police killings

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19. How the selfie transformed this year’s demonstrations, from Ferguson to New York.

Jamil Smith ‏@JamilSmith 1h1 hour ago

The real power of #ICantBreathe protests might be most visible in ill-framed iPhone photos. Read @jaycaspiankang: http://nyti.ms/1zJJGFS

The New York Times
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What’s Really Radical About the Eric Garner Protests

By The New York Times @nytimes

How the selfie transformed this year’s demonstrations, from Ferguson to New York.
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Members of the news media, who outnumbered the protesters by a factor of five, moved their cameras in close and asked the usual questions: “What brought you out tonight? What did you think of the grand jury’s decision?” The words: “Protests Planned in New York City” spun around the news ticker above the scrum. On a giant screen several stories up, a TV newscast cut to live coverage of the four protesters. At the edge of the frame, passers-by held up their cellphones to shoot their own footage of the news footage.

This sort of gazing, self-gazing and gazing-at-self-gazing has marked the marches in New York City that started last Wednesday and continued throughout the week, with another large protest scheduled for this Saturday. Protesters have taken thousands of cellphone photos and shared them on every social-media platform available, captioned with a condensed, hashtagged version of the sort of political chatter that usually populates timelines and newsfeeds (#ICantBreathe, #NoJusticeNoPeace, etc.). The selfies and all the tweeting-while-marching could easily be dismissed as typical millennial narcissism or, worse, evidence of a cynical streak in today’s youth that values self-tagged online outrage over more legitimate forms of outrage, but that would miss the point. The protests in New York City were, in large part, a staging ground for people to take and upload personal images, and that, more than the chanting or the marching, seemed to be the point.

A few months ago, I came across a commissioned set of photographs by Jonno Rattman from the People’s Climate March, held in September in New York City. The march, which put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Manhattan, was more akin to the great protests of the baby boomer era than it was to Occupy Wall Street. In that spirit, the photographer shot the entire thing in black and white and chose to print photographs of people who looked, in their way, timeless. Outside of some minor cues — the brand of a jacket, a haircut invented after 1980 — there was little way of knowing that this march happened in the age of digital photography. It seems that the textbook images of American protest, whether from Montgomery, Kent State or the Summer of Love, inspire an intense, yet distancing, nostalgia in those of us who did not live through those years. We feel jealous that we were not young when they were young. How could we, in 2014, ever be as impassioned, as militant as they were in those black-and-white photos of the Freedom Summer?................