The Occupy Wall Street movement is, in their own words:

Occupy Wall Street is a people’s movement. It is party-less, leaderless, by the people and for the people. It is not a business, a political party, an advertising campaign or a brand.  It is not for sale.

While I was photographing the November 5 march of the Occupy Orange County, Irvine camp (see my highlight pictures here) I tried to get closeup portraits of a representative sample of the people present.  The movement isn’t about any one of these people; it’s about all of them together, and together they represent the diversity of the 99%.

I’m calling this project “The Faces of Occupy Irvine.”  I don’t normally showcase my work as a slideshow in posts, but for this I think it’s appropriate (see the gallery for all of the images separately):

Not seeing a slideshow or want to look at the individual images? Click on the image above or head to my Faces of Occupy Irvine gallery; the slideshow on that page works on iPads and iPhones.

These are raw street portraits: all but one of these were taken as a single exposure with natural lighting, no reflectors, no flash, and no posing instructions from me¹.  All of the people pictured here gave their permission to have their images captured.

I was inspired to do this project by the work of street photographers like Medhi Bouqua (see, for example, this post) and Danny Santos II.

Here are a few of my favorite images from the series: