God will hold you accountable for your wicked documentation
Photographer: Robin Fader
Exhibit Title: God will hold you accountable for your wicked documentation
Location: United States
They arrive in a bus and then proudly strut down the street carrying gruesome, graphic signs featuring dead fetuses. They yell messages of shame and hate into the faces of approaching abortion patients coming to seek healthcare. At an almost deafening volume, they preach into microphones about murdering children and the sins of God. They are aggressive, forcefully trying to block entry to the narrow doorway that leads into this abortion clinic.
All of this happens at an abortion clinic in Hagerstown, Maryland, known by abortion clinic escorts around Maryland as one of the most difficult places to defend. The escorts there must be highly trained and supremely dedicated to their task — in a flash, they identify an approaching patient and create a protective barrier around them while hustling them to the clinic door. The efforts to protect women seeking healthcare is extraordinary and simultaneously surreal that this has to happen at all in a blue state where abortion is legal throughout pregnancy. "God will hold you accountable for your wicked documentation" is yelled in my face as I attempted to capture the events.
I strongly believe…
We must choose to face head on, and not look away from, the encroaching fascism, misogyny, racism and white nationalism that is growing insidiously in our own backyards.
Through my photography, I am focusing on presenting images that focus on activism, protests, social justice, reproductive freedoms and pro-democracy matters. My goal is to show people the grassroot, ground-level events that they wouldn’t normally see -- even what they might not want to see. For example, a community that regularly defends drag story time against Christian white nationalists so that families and children can enter without hearing words of hate, the volunteers who protect women entering an abortion clinic against vile protesters and following the young activists speaking truth to power outside the homes of certain Supreme Court Justices.
It has taken me years to cultivate these relationships and I find great hope in our future given that these communities exist.
I am privileged to be able to be on the streets of Washington, DC with my camera on the edge of this political precipice. My hope is to capture images that reveal the truth about threats to our most precious freedoms.
robinfader@mac.com
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