Protests and Photographers

Delaney Ruth

dr678316@ohio.edu

 

Photographers have been capturing the faces of protests for years. The entire objective of a photojournalist being at a protest is to capture the human experience they are seeing. If they are to blur the faces of the protesters, how can people actually sympathize and understand the purpose of these protests?

Protests are not meant to be easy or fun. They are meant for justice and equality. No one goes to a protest just to meet up with friends or have a good time. They have a purpose beyond all that.

Picture source: Huffington Post

 

It is a hard subject to discuss because I can see both sides to the argument of blurring protesters faces and not blurring them. On one hand if you go to a protest, you are fighting for something bigger so why should you care if your face is shown? You believe in equality and freedom, what is wrong with that? But on the other hand, is it worth it to be fired from you job because your face appears on NBC News?

In my opinion, the number one issue is the fact that you can actually be punished for attending protests. I really can not believe that it is legal and completely okay for companies to be able to fire people for this. I want to ask, how is that complying with the first amendment? But we know too well that this happens more than we would like to admit, according to an article from CNBC.

It is crazy to me that, even though it is written in our first amendment that citizens of our country are allowed to protest that people can be fired for attending a protest. Is American not the land of the free? How can we be free if we can be fired from our job for using our right to protest?

Something needs to change in our country. Firing people for protesting is absolutely insane and I can not understand how an employer could do this. Protesting is how things get changed. Without the months of protest after George Floyd's death, we probably would not even be talking about this anymore. The Black Lives Matter protests keep happening because they are important and necessary. We can not allow ourselves to forget about the countless lives lost. They did not deserve what happened to them, so we must keep fighting for justice. It is sad that some people have to decide if they want to risk losing their job or not for fighting in what they believe in. America, please do better.