Capturing the Power of Protest Through Double-Exposure Photography

I have been feeling a little bored with photography, to the point where I feel it has become predictable. In most cases, I pretty much know how something is going to look even before I make a photo of it.

Also needing something new to sink my teeth into, I decided to start making more unpredictable photos by focusing on double-exposures in my personal work for the foreseeable future. Within that technique, I thought using the potential chaos of a double-exposed frame would be useful in communicating how it feels to be at some of the many protests Washington, DC has to offer throughout the year.

However, there aren’t protests here every day (even in DC). As a backstop against protest-less days, a second subject I’ve found is great for double-exposures are the different national monuments in the city. They all have clean, white backgrounds and are usually busy with tourists too busy doing goofy things for their own photos to be bothered with me using them as compositional objects.

The black and white images are from film I loaded into cassettes myself and I processed at home. I plan to start processing color at home in the near future as well, but for the time being, I’ve found a great place in Baltimore that will develop film inexpensively - Full Circle Fine Arts Services .

Despite all the commercial work on my website, street photography is really the reason I put the camera to my face. Check out some fresh work below and let me know what you think!

Attendees walk along the National Mall during the March for Life, Jan. 20, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Attendees walk along the National Mall during the March for Life, Jan. 20, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Washington Monument, double-exposures, Jan. 2023 in Washington, DC
Washington Monument, double-exposures, Jan. 2023 in Washington, DC
Washington Monument, double-exposures, Jan. 2023 in Washington, DC
Washington Monument, double-exposures, Jan. 2023 in Washington, DC

Tea Party - Better Late Than Never

During a massive cleaning of my office, I rediscovered some negatives from a self-assigned shoot to photograph a Tea Party rally in the summer of 2009 (I think) at a race track in Bay Town, Texas. Wanting to try something different, I rented a Hasselblad medium format camera and made the trek out to the rally. I seem to be attracted to the overt patriotism: flags and people dressed up as figures from American history, as well as a sense of the paranoia of a dystopian, socialist future that seems to drive much of the conversation at these events. Also to note: I shot a couple of different film stocks. One is chrome and the other was an expired batch of porta left over from grad school.[gallery]