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Fury and despair: behind the viral image of Americans
protesting against lockdown
Photography
Joshua
Bickel set out to cover a demonstration in Ohio – and within hours, his photo
of angry people pressed up against glass took on a life of its own
Poppy Noor
@PoppyNoor
Sat 18 Apr
2020 11.00 BSTLast modified on Sat 18 Apr 2020 11.01 BST
Monday was
just an ordinary day for Joshua Bickel. A photojournalist for the Columbus
Dispatch, he set out to cover a protest outside Ohio governor Mike DeWine’s
daily press briefing, where about 100 protesters had gathered. He dutifully
took the shots.
One of
them, an image depicting demonstrators pressed up against the glass outside the
governor’s office demanding Ohio reopen for business, was quickly taken before
Bickel moved on for another angle.
But within
hours, the picture had taken on a life of its own and was shared thousands of
times. Commentators forecasted awards in Bickel’s future; others spliced his
work up to make memes portraying the protesters as zombies; some even wished
death and sickness on them.
“That part
of it was hard for me, to be honest,” says Bickel. “I never want people to die,
I never want people to get sick.”
Bickel
lives in the local area, so he understands what people in Columbus are going
through right now and their economic frustrations. Like much of the US, he says
the pandemic has revealed underlying inequalities in the area.
Some people
are relatively unaffected by the pandemic, able to keep their jobs, work from
home and pay their rent. Others have watched their lives fall apart. In the two
weeks preceding the photo, almost half a million people in the state filed for
unemployment.
“Some
people are really hurting right now. That’s an effect that is going to be felt
long after this is over,” said Bickel.
As for the
particular people in the photograph, Bickel is unsure: he had to stay separated
from them to maintain social distancing protocol. “[Normally,] I like to sit
down and talk with people if I can, to show a real story. This photo is like
the total opposite of that – I was in a room, I [couldn’t] leave the room, they
were outside,” he said.
Bickel
tries to stay open-minded about the people he photographs, and understands that
the job is to show exactly what is in front of you. That does not necessarily
mean being nice, but it does mean being honest:
“They were
basically saying like, ‘Being closed is hurting me economically and it’s not
necessary’ … I try to stay open-minded. I sympathize with everybody. I
understand that everybody’s experience [of this pandemic] is different,” he
said.
He believes
that is why the image has resonated so much: the glass separation in the photo
is unique to this moment, but it also speaks to the metaphorical moment –
everyone is going through the same thing, but experience it in a myriad of
ways.
“People are
reacting to it this way because they see [the photo] from my perspective, but
they are bringing their experience and their belief system into how they
interpret the image, and they are symbolically seeing that divide,” he says.
He has been
overwhelmed to find such sudden interest in a photo that, after he took it, he
all but forgot about. “It’s funny, I didn’t even mark the photo as No 1 [when I
uploaded it at work]. It was No 3,” he says.
Asked what
he wants people to take away from the image, Bickel reminds us that the photo
is simply an accurate depiction of a moment in time.
“Some part
of me knows that I made this photograph, but another part knows that it doesn’t
really belong to me now,” he said.
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That Ohio protest photo looked like a zombie
movie. Zombie movie directors think so, too.
The Columbus Dispatch photo of an
anti-social-distancing protest in Ohio went viral this week.
Maura
Judkis
April 17,
2020 at 5:18 p.m. GMT+2
The
insatiable flesh-hunger of zombies wasn’t exactly on photographer Joshua A.
Bickel’s mind when he was covering an anti-social-distancing protest at the
statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday. But it was all that was on the, well,
braaaaaains of people who saw Bickel’s work on social media, where the photo
went viral for its parallels to classic zombie films.
The
Columbus Dispatch photographer’s image is frightening and compelling.
Approximately 100 protesters who were urging Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to end the
state’s stay-at-home order and reopen businesses pressed up against the glass
doors to the statehouse, chanting and banging windows.
One wears a
Guy Fawkes mask. Two men wear Trump-branded baseball caps. Two women, the
closest to the windows, shape their mouths into the same elongated howl as
Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” American flags obscure some of the protesters in
the back.
“I thought
this was a screencap from a zombie movie,” tweeted one woman.
“Some
strong ‘Shaun of the Dead’ energy in this photo from the protests in Ohio,”
tweeted another man.
It looked
awfully familiar to Michael Satrazemis, the director of photography for “The
Walking Dead” and director of “Fear the Walking Dead,” two shows that seem a
little scarier these days, since they’re about a zombie apocalypse that begins
with an uncontrollable pathogen.
The visual
trope is “classic horror,” says Satrazemis. It plays on the common fear of
claustrophobia, making the audience “feel the walls are closing in and the
world is shrinking around you. And there’s no way out.”
It’s a
device his show has deployed across seasons: In their pursuit of humans, the
walkers have been trapped against chain link fences, and, in a particularly
memorable scene, a revolving glass door. (“That was really, really a crazy
sequence just because to get out, [the humans] had to revolve it,” says
Satrazemis. But the way they were positioned in the door, it meant someone
would get pushed out to the zombies, and eaten.) He thinks the device works
best when the pressure of so many bodies against the glass cracks it slowly
until it shatters and the zombies come pouring in. “You can really kind of
build up and intensify the horror,” he says.
Tom Savini
acted and did the makeup and prosthetics for George Romero’s “Dawn of the
Dead,” the 1978 film in which zombies pursue humans in a shopping mall. Seeing
the Ohio protest image for the first time, he was drawn to the different attire
and personalities of the people in the glass, much like the film.
“The
zombies were all sorts of types of people. There was a guy in a suit, like he
had come directly from the funeral home. There were football players. Clowns. A
woman in a wedding dress,” says Savini. “It’s very, very similar to ‘Dawn of
the Dead.’ ”
But the
trope works two ways — both in horror, and in Bickel’s photo. Often, the
screaming faces pressed up against the glass are the monsters. But sometimes,
as in Satrazemis’s revolving door, they’re the protagonists — and they’re
trapped as they try to flee the zombies.
The barrier
provides a decisive moment for them: It’s time to fight back. People who aren’t
in favor of social distancing and are pushing to quickly reopen the economy see
prey, not predators in the screams of the Ohio protesters. They see heroes.
Bickel saw
door frames.
“When I was
making the picture, I thought the windows and door were an interesting
compositional element, but not much beyond that,” he told The Post via email.
The resemblance to a zombie movie didn’t occur to him until other people
pointed it out on Twitter.
Savini sees
comedy. “It reminds me of ‘Shaun of the Dead,’ ” the 2004 British “Dawn of the
Dead” parody, he says. Promotional images for that film do the glass trope,
too. There’s an element of humor in the Ohio image for Satrazemis, as well:
Though the people might look as though they could have been on his show, “We
wouldn’t style it with so many funny hats.”
Satrazemis
was in the middle of shooting the upcoming season of “Fear the Walking Dead”
last month when the production was shut down because of the coronavirus. It
felt like life imitating art — well, the virus part, not the shuffling,
flesh-eating monster part. Themes from the last month, he says, may show up in
that season, whenever they get the chance to finish it.
Savini says
current events make him feel like he’s in the film “28 Days Later.” That one is
about a highly contagious rage-inducing virus, where survivors must make their
way through an abandoned London and a quarantined Britain.
“What makes
it seem like a horror movie to me is when I walk a block away from my house and
all the stores, the restaurants . . . are empty, closed, dark on Friday night,”
he says. “That’s like, what the hell’s going on?”
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