Alice Vol. 6 No. 1

Alongside the protestors’ call for justice, the
violent noise of colliding bodies in the searing
heat, the hiss of tear gas and the crack of
rubber bullets from the barrel of a gun, few
noticed the stray clicks of a camera capturing history.
Those frozen frames of tangible anger soon covered
newspapers, magazines, websites and social media,
captivating thousands with images depicting the
nation’s unrest.
Yet for some photographers, taking these photos isn’t
about gaining notoriety.
“We’re not here to make beautiful images,” Taylor
Gerlach, a University of Georgia senior and photo editor
of UGA’s newspaper The Red & Black said. “We’re
here to tell a story that needs to be told and honor the
humanity of the people in that story.”
It is necessary to tell other people’s stories, Gerlach
said, pointing out how journalism is under attack for
occasions when the news was “skewed.”
“For me, [photos are] like a very accurate portrayal
of what is happening,” she said. “And I think photos
have a lot more power sometimes to show emotion,
connection and humanity.”
Angela Wang, a University of Texas senior and UT
Athletics student assistant, said protests must be
photographed so what is happening is not disregarded.
“People fifty years from now could say [protestors]
were throwing rocks at the police and that’s why they
were fired on by rubber bullets, [but] the photos will
overwhelmingly show that the police misconduct came
first,” Wang said.
Hannah Saad, a senior at The University of Alabama,
The Crimson White’s photo editor and a contributing
photographer at Alice Magazine, said it is easy for
people to ignore words, but not photography.
“When you can see mass crowds gathering for Black
Lives Matter that hits differently than someone tweeting
like ‘oh there’s a big group in front of the courthouse,’”
she said. “I can show you what’s going on through
photography better than someone can really type out
what’s going on.”
Saad said photographs better highlighted how many
protestors’ wanted to speak up during the Black Lives
Matter movement.
“People connect better with seeing human emotion
from people at these protests and seeing the hurt they’ve
been through,” she said.
Daniel Roth, the digital content producer in the
Tuscaloosa Mayor’s office of public information, agreed
with Saad’s sentiment, sighting how photography was
“an incredibly powerful tool.”
“We saw the power that the video of George Floyd had
and what that did to the hearts of our country,” he said.
“I think photography is in the same line and can be just
as powerful. [It] can get you outside of your own bubble
and [help you] see that things are happening outside
your world.”
Ian Hoppe, a managing producer of news video at
Alabama Media Group, summed the importance of
photographing protests up when he said, “It’s history,
man.”
Hoppe said when he first got into media, he learned
from a seasoned reporter that journalists “don’t [just]
Google [information] – you go out and get the story,
and you become part of the record.” He said it made
him realize sometimes the story doesn’t exist and
journalists have to pull the pieces together using photos
as punctuation to a story that becomes the record of an
event.
“It’s a difficult, important and rewarding role to have
in the world,” he said.
While getting the story, photographers have witnessed
and felt the effects of the protest.
“The best photo is the one [where] you’re closest to the
action,” Hoppe said. “That’s always been the case. The
best photographers, video journalists, photojournalists
... they’re not standing a block away. They’re in the
action, and sometimes that can be harrowing.”
Hoppe said he saw colleagues who were attacked at
protests. For him, the protest on June 3, in Huntsville,
Alabama, was particularly harrowing.
Hoppe said the protest took place in Big Spring Park
and was peaceful until it was shut down earlier than
expected. While still marching, the protestors and
Hoppe found themselves in a standoff against police
officers suited in riot gear armed with rubber bullets,
batons and tear gas launchers.
“I had never been tear gassed before then either, so
I was anticipating what that would be like. Turns out,
it’s pretty awful,” he said. “They unleashed a lot of tear
gas, and it was just absolute chaos. I saw kind of the
very intense power of a police department in the 21st
century unleashed on a group of citizens, which is a
pretty moving moment.”
Wang said she witnessed many unsettling moments
while at protests in Austin, Texas.
She recalled a protest where she saw a woman collapse
and be carried away by another protestor. A few days
later, she found out the extent of what happened to her.
According to KXAN Austin, the woman had been
sitting on the ground when officers shot her with rubber
bullets in the stomach, back and back of her head.
“There was absolutely no reason for that,” she said.
Yet, while there are harrowing moments, some
photographers experienced moments that were
impactful in other ways.
“I went to the first protest in Birmingham, and the
energy here is always very powerful,” Roth said. “So, it’s
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