A photo exhibition is exploring the state of street protests in the year after the election of President Donald Trump.
“Resistance Photography: A Year of 45” features the works of eight photographers giving their individual perspective on the many forms of protests, marches and public acts of resistance they’ve documented over the last year.
Chris Baker Evens, one of the artists featured, said the exhibition developed after the collaborating photographers got to know one another from covering the same events.
“We are a group of photographers who met each other at the many protest events over the last few years,” Evens said. “We organized ourselves into a support network six months ago and this exhibit is the first public event featuring our collective art.”
“We take photos of people combating racism, bigotry, war, hate or other injustices,” photographer Joe Piette added. “Since some of us are political activists as well as photographers, we want our art to reflect protesters’ convictions in a way that humanizes their movement.”
Out photographer Kaltoum Alibrahimi covered protests before and after the election and noted that the media portrayal and public perceptions of protesting have changed drastically in the last year.
“For a lot of us that have been documenting the resistance long before Trump, if anything has changed it’s that people feel more inclined to be out on the street and more overt with their political beliefs that dismiss so many people in this country,” Alibrahimi said. “As a queer woman of color, the issues we document are very much personal to me. The importance for me has piqued largely because of the criminalization of dissent. We see protesters from [Inauguration Day] Jan. 20 still facing up to 70 years and insane fines simply for speaking out and existing in opposition to what many believe is a fascist president.”
Alibrahimi is a transplant from North Carolina but quickly became a fixture at local protests.
“I’ve always gone to protests and documented and been out and about in the community. As I started going to protests in Philadelphia, I started seeing the same faces more frequently and they became familiar faces and soon after friends. It’s like a small community within the many communities that I drift into.”
“Resistance Photography: A Year of 45” is on view through Dec. 31 at The Green Line Café, 4239 Baltimore Ave. For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/events/1732459343725691/.