Lens Archives Nina Berman’s Agenda In 2009, we talked to Nina Berman about “Homeland,” a meditation on the militarization of American culture. Read more»

Nina Berman was intrigued by the idea of protest in this age, so when she heard about a nascent uprising that was gaining national momentum, she had to check it out.

“I had an open mind,” she said. “I was wondering what made them tick, who showed up and what united them. Were they right wing? Did they draw from the left and the middle? Was it as crazy as people made it out to be?”

She was talking about the Tea Party movement, which she photographed at a huge rally in Washington in 2010. A year later, she had some of the same questions about the throngs that streamed into Lower Manhattan as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. As she has discovered, though there are obvious differences in ideologies, the groups have some similarities. Both have staked a claim to be defenders of grass-roots values. And at times their critics have dismissed both as out of step with the rest of the nation.

Frankly, when she first heard of the young protesters descending upon Zuccotti Park, she reacted like a New Yorker.

She thought it was a fringe thing.

Nina Berman/NOOR

Nina Berman/NOOR

“When you see all these young people jumping around and dancing with their clothes half off, you think they’re just having a blast,” she said. “I didn’t take it seriously. But then I realized, in my own head, we have come to think of any act outside the norm as somehow fringe. New York has become in many ways a conformist town. I had to look at my own reactions more carefully.”

These are questions that have informed her own photographic work over the years, where she has displayed a decidedly political point of view. Her series “Homeland” looks at what she sees as the militarization of America after the Sept. 11 attacks. In “Hedge,” the monitors of hedge fund traders are multicolored clues to global financial crisis.

As she watched the New York protests, she noticed the numbers – the likes of which she had not seen in the city on any sustained basis. She found people who were hardly young and some who were financial executives themselves. Her interest was drawn to moments she was not seeing in the daily press coverage. She was not looking for confrontation pictures, since she thought that was a “minor” aspect.

“You can go on for hours and then have 10 minutes of a pocket of violence and that becomes representative of the five hours before,” she said.

Her take was more personal, finding individual acts of “creative protest” in the streets.

“There was this woman with a red umbrella in the street,” she said. “Right after the mayor and the manager of the park said they were not going to descend on the park, she stood up in the middle of the street and did this drum majorette routine with her umbrella.”

When she looked at her recent pictures and those of Tea Party adherents, the differences were evident upon first impression. The Tea Party — which was better organized and financed — was almost “exclusively white,” older and better off financially. And their protest, she said, had a sharper edge, often resorting to images that mocked President Obama.

“A lot of their symbolism is about defacing,” she said. “They make him into a Joker, in whiteface, or as a wild animal in feathers.”

Yet there is some shared symbolism.

“They both hoist the American flag,” she said. “I find that fascinating. In some ways, it means the same thing. They both want liberty and feel tyrannized and put upon. They both feel underrepresented. And they both hoist the flag as a way to show they deserve something that relates in one way or another to the founding principles.

“If you got individuals from both camps in conversation, they would find themselves more similar than they seem.”

Nina Berman/NOOR

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