Photo: Stacy Lanyon
A friend of mine told me
there was something going on at Zuccotti Park. I had been away on the
Saturday it started. I got back on Sunday morning and went down there in the afternoon
of September 18th. Some of my activist friends had told me to get
down there. And there it was. It just hit me within seconds. It was very
apparent that this was something different and powerful. What could I do? I had
to stay, and I’ve been there ever since. I felt a big
responsibility to cover it, to get the message out. These were voices, in
many ways, from the voiceless. My way of contributing to helping get this word
out was just to do what I do, which is to take pictures. In this case, it was
about posting it on Facebook to get the word out. There were so many
struggles and battles and issues that were converging on that park at that time
that it was impossible not to become involved with some if not all of those
issues.
The fact that it was in the shadows of Wall Street was brilliant. There was no better place to hit the financial market than to go straight into the heart of it. The daily marches were extraordinary—just the power and the energy. That’s why it took off so quickly. I remember that march on that first Sunday night I was there. That was my first Occupy march, and it was powerful. I had been to marches before in India and in various other places—in London and what have you. This was a whole different thing. First of all, this was America, which in many ways in my mind had been asleep for so many years. I had almost given up that there was going to be any kind of social revolt here because there had been so much stuff going on that it was really just sort of, “What does it take?” This was the moment that I had been looking for and hoping for.
Those marches at the beginning of our occupation were key to getting it on the map. It wasn’t just about sitting in the park. It was very much about the movement in that area and the organization of people and the events that were going on all around. Zuccotti was just a staging ground. It was a very, very important place to be. That’s the mobilization that we needed to have. We needed to see these guys in suits timidly hiding in the doorways and reading their newspapers, while an army of marchers passed with banners that were very, very clear to what was going on. I really enjoyed that. Life in the park just grew and grew. Things went on to flourish. Next thing I knew, there was fifty, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred people. It mushroomed so quickly that it became this massive snowball. It was those marches to me and those various actions that gave it the presence that I felt so attracted to.
I’ve been involved with various elements of human rights over the years. I also had been asleep for many years. I spent a lot of years wrapped up in my own shit. I didn’t come from a struggling, fighting family. I came from the opposite. When I got to America, I ended up living in LA for ten years before I came back to NY six years ago. When I was in LA, I was just a deadbeat zombie. I had nothing going on. I had no interests. We're often a product of our environment. I was losing faith in this place and most of the world. I’m from the Isle of Wight. It’s a small island off the south coast of England. I grew up on a farm and just ran around the fields most of the time. I went to boarding school at 7 1/2. Various mothers and fathers came and went. I became very independent at a young age. I pretty soon figured out that it was about, “look after yourself.” When I was nineteen, I moved to Berlin. That’s when I first got politically involved and began marching.
The first demonstration I was involved in was in 1986. I was living in a squat in Berlin, and I got wrapped up in protests against the Reagan visits to Berlin. It was actually pretty hard-core. I got inspired by civil unrest. I didn’t really understand why I was doing it, but I really enjoyed it. I picked up a camera, and I began shooting stuff there. I did a couple years in Berlin and then came back and slipped into my career at the time, which was photography. I became a very sought after black and white photographic printer. I was a dark room rat, basically, but I become quite good at it, and that’s what got me to the states. I was plucked by somebody over here in New York to come over and set-up a black and white photo lab. I came over in September of 1995. I ended up meeting my wife and going to LA. She was in film production. We ended up buying a house there and having kids. In fact, we celebrated our 16 year anniversary a few months ago.
We lived in LA, and we bot go bored of it. My wife is a very successful producer. I was doing stuff for TV. I was working for channel 4. They made movies like Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, and I was their man over there for a few years. Then, I was directing behind the scenes stuff and doing stills and basically fucking about in my life. I was doing jobs, but there was no real meaning, just doing them out of substance abuse and various levels of depression, really. It’s all relevant, you know. Then, we ended up in New York with our boys about six years ago. A friend got me back into what I’m really good at, which is telling stories and getting the word out.
I ended up on a project in Bhopal, India about five years ago. This is the work I continue to do actively to this day—supporting the Bhopal cause of injustice and multi-national corruption. Occupy was just a very natural stepping stone for me. It’s been extraordinary. Things are just beginning to happen now. It takes time. Yes, the park was cleared by the police. Yes, the naysayers and the corporate media have done their best to get rid of it. Yes, in a lot of people’s minds, Occupy is dead, but I believe the opposite because I think there are enough sparks in the minds of people that I know they’re not going back. They’re not going to sit around again and let shit go on. I think that what Occupy did for a lot of us is give us the power, even if it was for just a couple months. We can do stuff. We can do something every day, and that’s the key thing. My Facebook page has changed into a firey cauldron of issues that I would have never been exposed to if it hadn’t been for Occupy. I measure it in terms of people talking and people thinking.
The fact that it was in the shadows of Wall Street was brilliant. There was no better place to hit the financial market than to go straight into the heart of it. The daily marches were extraordinary—just the power and the energy. That’s why it took off so quickly. I remember that march on that first Sunday night I was there. That was my first Occupy march, and it was powerful. I had been to marches before in India and in various other places—in London and what have you. This was a whole different thing. First of all, this was America, which in many ways in my mind had been asleep for so many years. I had almost given up that there was going to be any kind of social revolt here because there had been so much stuff going on that it was really just sort of, “What does it take?” This was the moment that I had been looking for and hoping for.
Those marches at the beginning of our occupation were key to getting it on the map. It wasn’t just about sitting in the park. It was very much about the movement in that area and the organization of people and the events that were going on all around. Zuccotti was just a staging ground. It was a very, very important place to be. That’s the mobilization that we needed to have. We needed to see these guys in suits timidly hiding in the doorways and reading their newspapers, while an army of marchers passed with banners that were very, very clear to what was going on. I really enjoyed that. Life in the park just grew and grew. Things went on to flourish. Next thing I knew, there was fifty, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred people. It mushroomed so quickly that it became this massive snowball. It was those marches to me and those various actions that gave it the presence that I felt so attracted to.
I’ve been involved with various elements of human rights over the years. I also had been asleep for many years. I spent a lot of years wrapped up in my own shit. I didn’t come from a struggling, fighting family. I came from the opposite. When I got to America, I ended up living in LA for ten years before I came back to NY six years ago. When I was in LA, I was just a deadbeat zombie. I had nothing going on. I had no interests. We're often a product of our environment. I was losing faith in this place and most of the world. I’m from the Isle of Wight. It’s a small island off the south coast of England. I grew up on a farm and just ran around the fields most of the time. I went to boarding school at 7 1/2. Various mothers and fathers came and went. I became very independent at a young age. I pretty soon figured out that it was about, “look after yourself.” When I was nineteen, I moved to Berlin. That’s when I first got politically involved and began marching.
The first demonstration I was involved in was in 1986. I was living in a squat in Berlin, and I got wrapped up in protests against the Reagan visits to Berlin. It was actually pretty hard-core. I got inspired by civil unrest. I didn’t really understand why I was doing it, but I really enjoyed it. I picked up a camera, and I began shooting stuff there. I did a couple years in Berlin and then came back and slipped into my career at the time, which was photography. I became a very sought after black and white photographic printer. I was a dark room rat, basically, but I become quite good at it, and that’s what got me to the states. I was plucked by somebody over here in New York to come over and set-up a black and white photo lab. I came over in September of 1995. I ended up meeting my wife and going to LA. She was in film production. We ended up buying a house there and having kids. In fact, we celebrated our 16 year anniversary a few months ago.
We lived in LA, and we bot go bored of it. My wife is a very successful producer. I was doing stuff for TV. I was working for channel 4. They made movies like Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, and I was their man over there for a few years. Then, I was directing behind the scenes stuff and doing stills and basically fucking about in my life. I was doing jobs, but there was no real meaning, just doing them out of substance abuse and various levels of depression, really. It’s all relevant, you know. Then, we ended up in New York with our boys about six years ago. A friend got me back into what I’m really good at, which is telling stories and getting the word out.
I ended up on a project in Bhopal, India about five years ago. This is the work I continue to do actively to this day—supporting the Bhopal cause of injustice and multi-national corruption. Occupy was just a very natural stepping stone for me. It’s been extraordinary. Things are just beginning to happen now. It takes time. Yes, the park was cleared by the police. Yes, the naysayers and the corporate media have done their best to get rid of it. Yes, in a lot of people’s minds, Occupy is dead, but I believe the opposite because I think there are enough sparks in the minds of people that I know they’re not going back. They’re not going to sit around again and let shit go on. I think that what Occupy did for a lot of us is give us the power, even if it was for just a couple months. We can do stuff. We can do something every day, and that’s the key thing. My Facebook page has changed into a firey cauldron of issues that I would have never been exposed to if it hadn’t been for Occupy. I measure it in terms of people talking and people thinking.
I think it’s pretty simple why it’s important that we all
come together to do this because if we don’t, we’re all going to get fucked. We
are getting fucked, so why not? Enough already. I really don’t want to get buggered
for the rest of my life. In simple terms, we have a future to consider. I have
a future. My children have a future. We should all be considering our future
much more carefully than we have in the past, so stopping for a moment banging
a few issues on the head and walking around Wall Street shouting up at the
buildings gives everybody an idea that there is something going on. There has
to be something going on.
The 2011, 2012, 2013 political culture hasn’t really changed. It’s just made provisions to make it more difficult for people like us to get in there and expose them. It’s still rampant with corruption and greed, so what can we do about that? I don’t know, but we have to organize individually, and this is why coming together on a local, national and global level is really important. Through social media, we’re all able to talk to people within milliseconds. We’ve just begun to understand our power. I’ve been blessed through the early days of Occupy. You see each other at events, and there’s sort of this quiet recognition, “Okay, we’re doing shit." We’re doing something, and that’s better than doing nothing.
I’m deeply affected by the suffering of others. That’s always been something that has affected me. That comes out in many ways. I do have a tendency in my present work to go to places that are suffering greatly because I think if you are going to tell a story, you want to try and understand. I’m never going to be a financial reporter. I’m never going to be good at doing anything around sports. I’m about human interaction and the human condition. I’ve actually really ramped it up a lot in the last year and a half or so after Occupy began to disperse and settle a bit and go into its own very subtle cells. I’ve always been a traveler and documentarian in different ways, but in the last year and a half, I’ve really stepped it up. I decided that I was going to help people understand how others live. I’m fortunate to have support from various publications. I’m represented really well by Vice magazine who are incredibly supportive of the places that I go and the things that I choose to cover.
Just this year, I found myself living with the Zapatistas. I was then for two weeks living down in Guatemala City covering incredible work of volunteer paramedics. I’m just so attracted to the unsung heroes—to the people who are helping, and not only heroes but just people who are living, minds who are unseen. It’s unfortunate that I have other commercial gigs that I have to do to keep the roof on the door, but basically my passion and my soul and my drive is all geared towards these stories in areas that are wounded and in trouble. I’m not a big fan of conflict, personally. I don’t go towards the army or the military. That’s not for me. I don’t agree with any of that. You’re not allowed to show wounded soldiers in the American army, so why am I going to try and get embedded with them if I can’t tell the truth? I’ve got much more important stuff to cover in terms of the political fallout that happens in the social structures that come about when politics runs wild.
The Ukraine is a perfect example of corruption just gone mad, a basic dictatorship that has finally exploded. These are all places that are suffering from very repressive political regimes. The things here in America are similar in many ways. There’s very little attention being paid to the poorest of the poor or even the veterans. There are so many discarded parts of society that are left to deal with things on their own with no help or direction. It’s about America flexing its military muscle in overseas trade and completely ignoring the real issues at home, so America is just as bad as a lot of them. Ukraine and all of these countries are forgetting about the people that actually live inside the country, so I’m keen to be with the people. I’m very keen to document and highlight not only the political struggles, but personal struggles.
I try with my work to get stories across that might touch people in that way that they can feel for that person. Through that person, they can understand a bit about the issues that they are facing within that country. That’s what I try and do, and I’ve become very driven by that. I recently went to a prison where refugees are being held in Amsterdam. They’re going to be kicked out in June. They’ve been given a prison just to keep them out of the way. They’re doing their best not to be seen as criminals, but already that’s a hard one. I lived with a hundred stateless refugees the first part of the week, and the second part of the week, I was in Sarajevo getting to know a little bit about the civil unrest there. The reason why I’m traveling so much at the moment is because I feel as the Occupy slogan goes that "All of our grievances are connected."
At the end of the day, you want to be awake to other people’s situations. There’s been a terrible divisive channel. There are a lot of different divisions in society. Occupy is that incredible bringing together people of all walks of life. The people that I’ve met and become very tight with and dear friends with are from all walks of life. Ultimately, it’s about waking up and coming together. I’d love to see the fucking banks be wiped off the face of the earth, but I don't know if that's going to happen in my lifetime. I want money out of politics. I want a complete change of the way the congress operates. There is a whole list of things that would make this country a whole lot better. I would love to see things change quickly, but I don’t know if it will. I’m always going to support people who are going for truth and honesty and fairness. One hopes for just an awakening.
The 2011, 2012, 2013 political culture hasn’t really changed. It’s just made provisions to make it more difficult for people like us to get in there and expose them. It’s still rampant with corruption and greed, so what can we do about that? I don’t know, but we have to organize individually, and this is why coming together on a local, national and global level is really important. Through social media, we’re all able to talk to people within milliseconds. We’ve just begun to understand our power. I’ve been blessed through the early days of Occupy. You see each other at events, and there’s sort of this quiet recognition, “Okay, we’re doing shit." We’re doing something, and that’s better than doing nothing.
I’m deeply affected by the suffering of others. That’s always been something that has affected me. That comes out in many ways. I do have a tendency in my present work to go to places that are suffering greatly because I think if you are going to tell a story, you want to try and understand. I’m never going to be a financial reporter. I’m never going to be good at doing anything around sports. I’m about human interaction and the human condition. I’ve actually really ramped it up a lot in the last year and a half or so after Occupy began to disperse and settle a bit and go into its own very subtle cells. I’ve always been a traveler and documentarian in different ways, but in the last year and a half, I’ve really stepped it up. I decided that I was going to help people understand how others live. I’m fortunate to have support from various publications. I’m represented really well by Vice magazine who are incredibly supportive of the places that I go and the things that I choose to cover.
Just this year, I found myself living with the Zapatistas. I was then for two weeks living down in Guatemala City covering incredible work of volunteer paramedics. I’m just so attracted to the unsung heroes—to the people who are helping, and not only heroes but just people who are living, minds who are unseen. It’s unfortunate that I have other commercial gigs that I have to do to keep the roof on the door, but basically my passion and my soul and my drive is all geared towards these stories in areas that are wounded and in trouble. I’m not a big fan of conflict, personally. I don’t go towards the army or the military. That’s not for me. I don’t agree with any of that. You’re not allowed to show wounded soldiers in the American army, so why am I going to try and get embedded with them if I can’t tell the truth? I’ve got much more important stuff to cover in terms of the political fallout that happens in the social structures that come about when politics runs wild.
The Ukraine is a perfect example of corruption just gone mad, a basic dictatorship that has finally exploded. These are all places that are suffering from very repressive political regimes. The things here in America are similar in many ways. There’s very little attention being paid to the poorest of the poor or even the veterans. There are so many discarded parts of society that are left to deal with things on their own with no help or direction. It’s about America flexing its military muscle in overseas trade and completely ignoring the real issues at home, so America is just as bad as a lot of them. Ukraine and all of these countries are forgetting about the people that actually live inside the country, so I’m keen to be with the people. I’m very keen to document and highlight not only the political struggles, but personal struggles.
I try with my work to get stories across that might touch people in that way that they can feel for that person. Through that person, they can understand a bit about the issues that they are facing within that country. That’s what I try and do, and I’ve become very driven by that. I recently went to a prison where refugees are being held in Amsterdam. They’re going to be kicked out in June. They’ve been given a prison just to keep them out of the way. They’re doing their best not to be seen as criminals, but already that’s a hard one. I lived with a hundred stateless refugees the first part of the week, and the second part of the week, I was in Sarajevo getting to know a little bit about the civil unrest there. The reason why I’m traveling so much at the moment is because I feel as the Occupy slogan goes that "All of our grievances are connected."
At the end of the day, you want to be awake to other people’s situations. There’s been a terrible divisive channel. There are a lot of different divisions in society. Occupy is that incredible bringing together people of all walks of life. The people that I’ve met and become very tight with and dear friends with are from all walks of life. Ultimately, it’s about waking up and coming together. I’d love to see the fucking banks be wiped off the face of the earth, but I don't know if that's going to happen in my lifetime. I want money out of politics. I want a complete change of the way the congress operates. There is a whole list of things that would make this country a whole lot better. I would love to see things change quickly, but I don’t know if it will. I’m always going to support people who are going for truth and honesty and fairness. One hopes for just an awakening.
Everything is evolving and changing. We can’t sit and think that we’re done
when some little bit of legislation gets changed.
Great, but there’s always going to be something else to do.
There is no stopping the urgency that is required to make this a better planet.
I would say we’re pretty much at a low right now the way that our corporate
media has brainwashed everybody, the way that our planet is dying, the way that
the animals are dying, the way that the species are dying off. We’re in big
fucking trouble right now, and unless we start doing some major changes, this slow death will only get faster. I look at my
children every day and fear for their future.
Even just simple things that you read like the honey bees are dying, the extinction rates are tripling every year. It’s a massive problem we live in. We all have work to do. People shouldn’t even have a second thought about wanting to highlight shit that is going on. If you think about it on a social level, you overhear people in a café moaning about something. They’re moaning about this, or they’re moaning about that. Instead of just standing here moaning about it, why don’t we all just get up and do something? If we all just did something, however small it is, we’d already be ahead of the game. The problem is that there’s just a few people doing stuff, and that’s a growing number, but there needs to be more of a collective effort from everyone. The trouble is that people don’t think they can do anything, but maybe that’s the biggest change that could happen, that we can all, individually say to ourselves, “Look, I can do that today.” Just do stuff that’s going to at least make people think. Help one another. I’m a big believer in all of that.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Even just simple things that you read like the honey bees are dying, the extinction rates are tripling every year. It’s a massive problem we live in. We all have work to do. People shouldn’t even have a second thought about wanting to highlight shit that is going on. If you think about it on a social level, you overhear people in a café moaning about something. They’re moaning about this, or they’re moaning about that. Instead of just standing here moaning about it, why don’t we all just get up and do something? If we all just did something, however small it is, we’d already be ahead of the game. The problem is that there’s just a few people doing stuff, and that’s a growing number, but there needs to be more of a collective effort from everyone. The trouble is that people don’t think they can do anything, but maybe that’s the biggest change that could happen, that we can all, individually say to ourselves, “Look, I can do that today.” Just do stuff that’s going to at least make people think. Help one another. I’m a big believer in all of that.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/