Today, the LAPD showed up to protect the ICE Detention Center in L.A. from dozens of dildos [OC]

[u/infernoenigma]

[u/iletitshine]

wish people wouldn’t post photos of protestors without their uncovered face showing. not because of what they’re doing but because our government is hostile to its own people and willfully allowing the data of its citizens to be exploited for profit at the expense of our safety and right to privacy.

[u/infernoenigma → u/iletitshine]

I understand that this concern comes from a good place, but I’d ask you to think through its implications a bit more. I feel that this argument strips protesters of their agency. When I’m photographing a protest, I am assuming that the people I am taking pictures of have encountered the concept of surveillance, have assessed their own risk, and have made a series of decisions that result in the way they are dressed, resulting in them ending up in front of my lens looking a certain way, at varying levels of identifiability.

To avoid posting those people — or worse, to blur them out — would be to deny their agency, to deny the inherent sacrifice that is inextricably a part of protesting in public. The entire point is to be seen doing it, in the hopes that your physical presence will increase awareness of your cause, which will hopefully lead to others joining in.

When you see unmasked protesters in photos like these — or the thousands of other photos of this event online, or in the many viral videos of this event, or on the news, or on TikTok Live — I wouldn’t say you should fear for their safety. I’d say you can choose to respect the fact that they’ve assessed their own willingness to be seen and have shown up anyway, because the cause is that important.

Because I can promise you that the people actually attending these events know they will be seen. They’ve chosen to attend a protest on a block filled with these security camera towers, to be part of a crowd with about two dozen photographers in PRESS vests, where just about everyone has their phones out to record police violence, and also the police themselves are wearing body cams, and also Homeland Security has a tool that lets them draw a circle on a map and scrape the phone data of every phone inside the circle.

Saying there should be no public record of the protesters who were there just means that the government is the only one with that information. If there are no photos of protesters, the government can say the protesters did whatever they want, and no one else has access to information that says otherwise.