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The Narrative

On July 19, 2021, Carthage College came under fire from its community and student body for attempting to restructure a number of its departments. In reality, the school was attempting to fire tenured professors because they were too expensive to keep employed, but they lacked cause to fire them. Their response to the situation was to "restructure" the departments, pressuring the professors into retiring early, in order to fire them without “firing them”.

Carthage students did not take kindly to this.

The college had trained their students to be critical thinkers and active participants in their community.It took no time at all for the students to organize a group and fill the campus to protest the restructuring.

After hours of making signs, giving speeches, and marching up and down the campus under a scorching July sun, John Swallow, Carthage's president, made an appearance.

He listened to some of the speeches by students, and tried his best to answer questions from the protestors. But nothing he said assuaged anyone with concern for their favorite professors. Once the tension grew too great, President Swallow took a step back from the crowd and went towards his home, a stately building at the edge of campus.

President Swallow stood behind the wrought-iron fence that separated him from his students, looking out at them. The students begged him to reconsider his decision, but it seemed the gap between the student body and the school's president was too great. The separation between the two stood firmly, like a wrought-iron fence post stuck deep into the ground.

The Technical

I carried a few lenses with me during this protest, but I chose to keep my f/1.8 85mm lens on for most of the day. Paired with my full frame Sony A7III, I often find that the 85mm offers the ability to create depth in an image and highlight a subject's importance against their background.

In this case, I wanted to be able to stand behind the students protesting, keeping them in the foreground, and center President Swallow in the frame, making the fence in front of him serve as a visual guideline for the most important elements of the photo: the students and the president.

I shot at ISO 100 because the light outside was plentiful and anytime I can keep the ISO low to minimize photo noise, I'm happy to do so. I chose to shoot this at 1/1600th of a second to get an absolutely crisp background subject (President Swallow), wanting to avoid the potential of the president moving and losing an otherwise amazing image to, for example, a blurry hand.

Seeing as there was almost too much light, I considered using a neutral density filter, which is a dark filter that controls how much light enters the camera sensor. However, I decided to opt out of using one, as the level of speed I was able to utilize due to the massive amount of light was too valuable to lose. The tradeoff was that there were moments where I had to turn down exposure in editing because there was, in fact, too much light in the image. But because I shoot exclusively in RAW file format, I was able to easily fix this issue in editing while gaining the benefit of extremely fast shutter speed. And as much as I'd like to be able to fix a blurry hand in editing, turning exposure in an image down a bit is a much more reasonable editing workload to put on yourself.

The Effect

Covered by a thick layer of trees older than most of the people there that day, President Swallow's home is separated from his students by fences both literal and figurative. In this photo, I sought to represent the literal barrier becoming a metaphorical one, separating the man from the people he's supposed to lead, who stand in the foreground, holding signs made from cheap cardboard and leftover paints they brought from home. Choosing to keep the president in the background crisp while blurring the students in the foreground highlights the contrast in the power dynamic of the situation. I wanted the viewer to feel the tension between the groups, while making it clear who the more "important" subject was through the use of that visual contrast.