2016 New Years Resolution Retrospective

A year ago I New Years tasked myself with making better portraits in 2016. Portraits have long been a daunting task for me. Photographing people directly is hard, I'm awkward, and there was a complex about vanity and posing and what it meant to take a portrait that I struggled to come to terms with. At the end of last year, I struggled to find good portraits I had made. I struggled to find any that really made me feel anything.

I think I made good on my resolution. There's still a lot of work to be done and I can't say that everything here is amazing, but it was a process and I welcomed it more than I ever have before. This year, I'm not ready to say this is what I want to get better at about anything in particular. I still want to get better at making portraits, and even more so, I want to get better about asking people if I can make their portrait. I also hope to make more video projects.  

I made a great deal more portraits than this, but I tried to distill the selection down to the stronger ones and to include the various opportunities I had. Hopefully they're worth your time. 

Thanks for looking and happy new year.

Fight for $15 Protest and Arrests

A couple weeks ago, I was out photographing a Fight for $15 strike at the start of their National Day of Disruption, where workers from the Fight for $15 union, along with SEIU, protested across the country with groups being arrested in multiple cities, often for failure to disperse.

I was there photographing a subject's story. Things were a little slow on that part and once things escalated, I switched to the other story at hand as the person I was photographing stood still watching the police arrest protestors seated in the street.

My goal is always to inform, and as such, I tweeted and Instagrammed pictures as the event happened. As I was working on someone's story, I didn't actually pack my laptop on me, something I regretted after - might have been handy to send the photos off.

Nothing worse than photographs you like never seeing the light of day, so here's the story of the morning protest in Los Angeles:

@justnlstewart