Unsettling Emotions at the New York City's Pride Parade, with Photos
Happy Pride, but not the happiest celebration.
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I did not enjoy the Pride parade this year. All other times that I photographed it, there was a palpable joy and sparkle in the air, none of which I felt this past Sunday. The parade seemed disorganized, with floats arriving after long pauses that left the crowds stranded. Many of these floats were gliding advertisements, overwhelmed by commercial branding drunk on its own virtue signaling. All the while, the crowd baked in the unforgiving heat, bored, agitated, and waiting for something to happen. The Pride Parade felt less like a celebration and more like a feast during the plague.
Maybe it was just me, maybe it was the suffocating sun, but I couldn’t get Camus’ Stranger out of my head,
“The sun was beginning to burn my cheeks, and I could feel the drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows… It was this burning, which I couldn’t stand anymore, that made me move forward.”
That line became a kind of heat-saturated mantra, and I set out to shoot with it looping in my mind.
Besides the heat and the long wait, what struck me the most was the alertness of the crowd to the camera. I’ve photographed three Pride parades before, all with my gigantic Nikon D4 and an assistant, and for the most part people were too enthralled in the celebration to pay attention to me. This time was different. Even though I was by myself with a tiny Leica, people were hyperaware of it, immediately striking a pose at the sight of me. It’s not that I always mind people looking at the camera, but I don’t care for template crowd shots, identical at every parade. I had to work fast and use distraction, looking in the opposite direction as I took quick shots of the people and moved on.
I’ve shot fast, and I shot a lot. In the span of four hours, I took 2000 images, with one or two frames per situation. Here are the things I wasn’t interested in repeating in more than a single frame, if at all.
Cheering crowds. Posing participants. Banners and signs. The parade itself.
Instead, I wanted to catch
Emotional undercurrents. Micro-stories. Interpersonal tension. Group dynamics.
I found those after an hour of frustration and blanks, just as I gave up on the idea of making anything happen and was ready to go home. As I left the parade route, a young woman passed by two policemen and put her finger to her nose, signaling to her friend. It was a fleeting, unsettling gesture, and it got me excited. My disappointment was replaced with a strange clarity, both sharp and overwhelming, and I hurried back into the parade to shoot. By that point, I was hot, exhausted, and dehydrated, but I managed to have a good time.
The next morning, I saw on the news that two teenagers were shot right by the Stonewall Inn that evening, one in the leg and one in the head. This horrible news mashed with my already mixed feelings about the celebrations, which seemed both frantic and a bit forced, with an undercurrent of violence. It’s impossible to divorce a city, even for a day, from everything happening around us, and though the celebrations were much needed, the noise, the heat, and the overstimulation this year felt closer to chaos than joy.
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They look bothered, humid, almost uniformly as if they'd prefer to be elsewhere but felt obligated. We can hardly expect a joyous resistance at this point sadly, how much resistance have people even got left?
I think the work shows itself as truth. The world is tired, maybe the youth can still save us.
With corporations being cowards and taking all of their funding out of Pride & DEI, mixed with the political climate, and the main Pride March becoming a symbol of rainbow capitalism anyway, this doesn't surprise me. Pride is supposed to be a protest and the real good feels & positivity were 3 avenues over at the Queer Liberation March–The anti-Pride march if you will, which is political, well organized, and standing up for the rights that are being taken away. I'd recommend you check it out next year!