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 Pierce College
When people gather for a cause, this photographer wants to be there.
When Ali Shahbazyar heard that students at the University of California, Los Angeles, were protesting the use of electroshock stun guns by campus police, he couldn’t stop himself from showing up with his camera. A photojournalism student at Pierce College in Los Angeles, he has always been drawn to “people’s gatherings” as a subject.
“Forming groups is the only way humans can survive,” he says. “And people always look more natural when they’re together.” Shahbazyar, who moved to the United States from Iran in 2005, originally planned to become a musician. Music has been greatly restricted by the Iranian government, however, so his energies went instead into teaching himself to use a camera. As a teen he tried to create photographs that would be the visual equivalents of Zen poetry.
Now working at a small portrait studio in Tarzana, California, Shahbazyar has learned to pay careful attention to expression and body language.
This comes through in his series of black-and-white images from the UCLA protests and allows the viewer to identify more fully with
the protesters. “I was trying to capture the moment that every single person
was working his or her hardest to be heard,” he explains.
—Miki Johnson
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