While things fall apart...

When Aimée Sitarz created the baby shoe art installation to honor the children being imprisoned when their parents sought refugee status in the USA, she hung it on private property facing the detention center used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The owner of that property tore it down and left it in the street. People from the encampment rescued some of the shoes and strung them up around the camp, but many shoes were left in a heap on the sidewalk near the camp. Aimee urged me to choose one of them to keep. 

I have taken a few days away from the encampment and have not been making photographs as I devote myself to online communications to support individuals and ongoing actions. Fear for the protesters continues to be my companion. Many of those at the camp are unhoused people who have skills for urban tent-living. The camp has become a magnet for people with mental illness and gender dysphoria, as they can be accepted as they are, and they can make their own contributions to social change, on their own terms. The camp seems to me to be a gathering place for those who are othered, outed, ridiculed, marginalized, and bullied for not achieving the American dream. The baby shoe stands for the immigrant children, and as I hold it in my hand, I feel how fragile, how vulnerable, how tender are all our lives, all of us who resist this wave of fascism that continues to bear down on us.