Portraits of Occupy Wall Street: "OccupiedNYC"

Fetzer, 51, From Waitsboro, North Carolina. Military Veteran, Arabic Linguist.

Boing Boing reader Eddie McShane, aka Macdawg, has been doing an amazing portrait series of people at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City. He shared some of the photographs in Boing Boing's Flickr pool. I spotted them while skimming the pool for interesting new contributions from our readers, and was blown away. I asked him to tell us more about the project. Eddie writes:

I live in New York City and until this week I had been following the protests via the internet and watching them grow but I didn't know how to get involved.

I have two jobs, and no money or resources to donate, so I decided to go down there and offer the one thing that I felt was useful: my time and skills as a photographer.

I wanted to show the faces of the occupiers and their supporters in a studio style setting, blank and deviod of any other context in order to highlight the human face of this protest.

The representation in the media has been that this is a bunch of unruly, hippie kids having a party downtown and that is simply not true. There are people from all walks of life and an incredible diversity of ages, races, and opinions and I wanted to show them as they wanted to be portrayed, simply, as people.

I have been down there in between working and when I am home I am editing furiously. I have to run off now to my day job but I am planning on continuing this series in what spare time I can carve out of my other obligations.

Eddie now has a tumblog where you can see the photos all in one set: OccupiedNYC.

Earl, 41, From Queens, New York