Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular. Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.

Accra Shepp

Occupying Wall Street

One Big Swarm of People

by Salamishah Tillet, Pultizer Prize winner for criticism

“Alright, you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there.” So opened the inaugural call for Occupy Wall Street. Linked in a tweet that Adbusters, the Vancouver-based, anti-consumerist magazine and activist collective, posted on June 9, 2011, their charge went on: “The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”

Inspired by the Arab Spring; protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square; and 15-M, the mostly youth-led anti-austerity movement that erupted in Spanish cities in 2011 (including an outpouring of 28,000 protesters in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square, in 2011), the idea was for twenty thousand people to flood Lower Manhattan and occupy Wall Street for several months. “Once there,” the text read, “we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.”

In a few short weeks, the forty who came on September 17 turned into four thousand, and what started as a message online turned into a movement. The demands originally aired at New York City’s Zuccotti Park were echoed in demonstrations in London, Lima, Johannesburg, and Jakarta—all over the world.

Ten years ago, when Accra Shepp went looking for such a swarm, he found himself at Zuccotti Park “under a patch of trees, surrounded by enormous skyscrapers on all sides.” Initially, without his camera, he just observed, listened, and felt the pulse of the people. Many of them were camping out there indefinitely; others came briefly, on a lunch break or after work, to declare their solidarity to this cause.

When Shepp next returned, he knew the events unfolding before him were real, and thus worth documenting. A private park had become a testing ground for buzzing economic justice. So he used a view camera, typically used for large-format images, to make portraits of the protesters and to capture this history…..

Convoke Gallery is pleased to present a new limited edition portfolio by Accra Shepp issued on the occasion of his monograph, Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice. This portfolio contains 20 gelatin silver prints in a custom dark gray clothbound clamshell box with silver lettering.

Accra Shepp

Occupying Wall Street Portfolio

20 Gelatin silver prints

16 x 20 inch (40.64 x 50.8 cm) sheets

Edition of 12

Makeda Best

Hilton Als

Dawoud Bey

Cornel West

CONVOKE