Published on 16/11/11

On the 15th of Octo­ber 2011 a num­ber of people from diverse back­grounds and ideo­lo­gies came together to dis­pute the cul­ture of greed that exists in the cur­rent fin­an­cial sys­tem. They are part of a global move­ment that is cur­rently ‘Occupy­ing’ over a 1000 cit­ies world­wide, most fam­ously, Occupy Wall Street. Although the mass media con­tin­ues to brand the move­ment ‘Anti-Capitalist’ in real­ity the major­ity of the protest­ors think that Cap­it­al­ism is the best sys­tem, it’s just been left unchecked and become bloated and cor­rupt. Ori­gin­ally the protest­ors planned to ‘Occupy’ the Lon­don Stock Exchange (LSX), how­ever, they fell short of that goal and ended up occupy­ing the space out­side it, on the edge of land between the LSX and St Pauls Cathedral.

With this work I aimed to show another side to the Occu­pi­ers, to illus­trate the level of organ­isa­tion and com­pas­sion that is hap­pen­ing. There are no vil­lains in this photo-series; the only city worker I pho­to­graphed is depic­ted donat­ing cheese to the occu­pi­ers. Instead I want the images to pro­voke a wider respect and under­stand­ing for what the occu­pi­ers are attempt­ing to accom­plish, which is draw atten­tion to the inad­equa­cies of our cur­rent fin­an­cial sys­tem. From the start I pho­to­graphed the Occu­pa­tion only at night, there was some­thing quieter about the place when the tour­ists and bulk of the media had gone home, the camp really came to life then, des­pite what some journ­al­ists reported.

The spoken word poetry that accom­pan­ies the slideshow is of a young black occu­pier I met called J.J, he’d never had any of his poetry recor­ded before, and there is some­thing cool about the fact the first and only poem he has ever had recor­ded was in a tent out­side St Pauls Cathedral.

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