Recognition is always nice. So when I opened the august issue of News Photographer Magazine, I was thrilled to see an advertisement for ZUMA Press, the agency that represents me, with one of my photographs. ZUMA is all about doing photos big when they use them. Whether it is in their advertisements or in their [...]
I had some time to kill before an assignment near the White House and decided to swing by and see if there might be some sort of protest. There always seems to be someone there protesting something. I was disappointed to see nothing was happening so I headed across Pennsylvania Ave. to Lafayette Park looking [...]
Kenneth Feinberg (born October 23, 1945, Brockton, Massachusetts)[1] is an American attorney, specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. Feinberg was appointed Special Master of the U.S. Government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and currently serves as the Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation, popularly called the "pay czar." Additionally, Feinberg currently serves as the government-appointed administrator of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund.
Design by 
Modified by Pete Marovich
Hosting by
Archive by 
Civil Disobedience – Kinda
There were three photographers in the Senate Press Photographer’s Gallery when Mark Abraham, the gallery deputy director, received an email saying that the Capitol Police were responding to a disturbance in the Capitol Rotunda. After the obligatory 15 seconds of trying to determine if he was serious or just messing with us, we took off in search of something interesting to shoot.
When we arrived, we found that as we feared, the “event” was pretty much over. The advocacy group GetEqual had staged a sit-in as part of an effort to force Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for a vote on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. The ENDA legislation would outlaw workplace discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.
Of course the Capitol Police frown on such behavior.
So when we arrived, law enforcement had already cleared the Rotunda of tourists and press and where in the process of handcuffing and searching the protesters. The shot above is really all there was to get at that point, but it was made a bit more interesting in the fact that GetEqual was being arrested under the eyes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. statue. Seemed a bit ironic.
I asked another photographer who had covered The Hill much longer than I had, where they would take them out of the building. I took off for the summer heat to see if there was anything else to be had.
Of course I was not that lucky. Just a few more frames of some of the protesters being loaded into the van. Of course the whole time all I could think was, “please, somebody try and make a break for it.” I had that vision of one of them running for freedom right at me as a couple of the Capitol’s finest tackled him. Oh well.
So not much in the way of civil disobedience or anarchy. If you ask me, it seems that protests and displays of public dissent are not what they used to be.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 6:19 pm. It is filed under On Assignment and tagged with Capitol Hill, Commentary, linkedin, People, photojournalism, photojournalist, Politics, Protest, Washington D.C.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.