PSC Blog

Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era and Changing Visual Perceptions

Written by Peter Hatzipavlis | 19 August 2014 4:22:49 AM

“It didn’t look like America. It looked like Soweto,” Danny Lyon said, referring to the South African township that was a hotbed of protests against apartheid. “It looked like soldiers. And soldiers’ job isn’t to protect. Their job is to kill people and to be ready to die.”

The photographs of unrest in Ferguson after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer have drawn comparisons to pictures of the Deep South in the 1960s.

Click here to read the article featured from The New York Times

 

Left, police officers detained a protester in Ferguson, Mo.; right, a police dog attacked a civil rights demonstrator in Birmingham, Ala., in May 1963. Credit Left, Whitney Curtis for The New York Times; right, Bill Hudson, via Associated Press