First Advisor

Emily Fitzgerald

Date of Award

Spring 5-22-2026

Document Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Social Science and University Honors

Department

Art

Language

English

Abstract

Protest Aesthetics: Identity, Surveillance, and Representation in Media examines a photo-based documentary project centered on the community of protesters who gather outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland, Oregon. Through medium-format color portraits, long-form interviews, and a large-scale handbound book, the project explores how political identity is constructed within a protest space shaped by surveillance, privacy, state violence, and media representation. Beginning from a more traditional approach to protest photography, the work shifted away from images of confrontation and spectacle toward a slower, more collaborative practice rooted in trust, repeated presence, and exchange. Portraiture became a way to engage individuals not only as protesters, but as people negotiating visibility, risk, care, conflict, and belonging within a sustained political community.

The thesis situates the Portland ICE facility as both a local site of federal immigration enforcement and a public symbol formed through protest, political rhetoric, media imagery, and surveillance. Drawing on documentary photography, social movement theory, and Susan Sontag’s writing on photographic evidence and representation, the project questions what protest images can and cannot reveal. It also reflects on the photographer’s positionality as a white man entering a space where the risks of policing, immigration enforcement, and public exposure are unevenly distributed. The final book form, OTG, uses French-folded pages, participant-selected names, paired interviews, and concealed portraits to slow the viewer’s encounter with the work. Rather than attempting to create a definitive image of the Portland ICE protests, the project asks what it means to photograph responsibly in a space where seeing is never neutral.

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