Today is the first blog post of three that make up my submission to Expedition May of the WE35 Research Project. Expedition May assignment was to photograph a local event or gathering and tell its story using 3 images. The three images are of a totem, a moment and a portrait.
For those that have been following the news you might have seen the story of a recent officer involved shooting in West Olympia that involved a white OPD police officer and 2 black men who had allegedly attempted to steal a case of beer from a local grocery story. I will no go into a great deal of detail about that shooting, you can use your favorite internet search tool and find out more than I could ever recap, and this post is in no means meant to express my opinions on what happened, IMO the investigation is still ongoing and I like to withhold these types of comments until I feel I have a good amount of the information available. This post, as well as the 2 to follow are meant to document the event, not to comment on it.
Today’s image, as well as the next two that I will share, are from the first protest at city hall after the shooting. For what I hope are obvious reasons I choose the above image as my “Totem” image as it feel it truly represented protest itself.
Stay tuned, my “Moment” and “Portrait” images will be coming early next week.