Studio 2.8 photography will soon begin a series of content background articles, including content citation background articles, content encyclopedic citation articles, as well as opinion based editorial articles, about the sometimes controversial political event photography that comprises a portion of the Studio 2.8 photography productions that appear here at the www.studiotwopointeight.com website. This basis for this new series of articles is that all too often, many media publishers omit, or even exclude, essential information about the images and events that appear in their photographs. The goal of this upcoming series of Studio 2.8 backgrounder and primer journal articles is to provide essential editorial and factual perspective on the photographic content presented on the Studio 2.8 photography website.
Of equal importance, while Studio 2.8 endeavors to objectively present the subjects photographed by Studio 2.8 photography, especially political event content that can often be controversial, it has also become essential to present information about the official editorial positions and stances of Studio 2.8 photography itself. Every media publisher, every press entity, has biases. Any media publisher that denies its biases, is a media publisher that shouldn’t be trusted. In contrast, standing politically firm, Studio 2.8 photography, its owner, and its employees, oppose racism, oppose bigotry, oppose fascism, oppose Nazism, oppose white supremacy, oppose seditious communist extremism, supports LGBTQ rights, supports racial civil rights including the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, supports marriage equality rights including the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, and more; because, although these stances are political, they also transcend politics because they represent the foundations of human rights, human decency, and a fair and just society, in which, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are core American values.
Given the foregoing paragraphs, Studio 2.8 is a proudly ethnic minority own media service. The Studio 2.8 photography and video service is owned and operated by a senior citizen, LGBTQ, woman of color, a woman who, in her childhood marched with the late Martin Luther King, Jr. in support of, and in hope of the passage of, the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act. The owner of the Studio 2.8 photography and videography service also shares a university Alma Mater with the late Martin Luther King, Jr. and has always been proud to have studied at a university where many of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s documents, manuscripts, and so on, were, and are, available in the university's library.
As a matter of historical political acumen, the proprietor of Studio 2.8 photography also participated proudly in political demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the late 1960s and early 1970s, primarily because the Vietnam War was a war that conscripted and sent hundreds of thousands of high school and college classmates, against their will and under threat of imprisonment, to a jungle on the opposite side of planet earth, to battle against other people, for reasons that to this day are difficult for even the most respected historians in the world to fully explain. In the 1960s, brave teenagers were being sent to battle, and to possibly die, (over 55,000 Americans did die in Vietnam), wearing just a green or khaki colored denim uniform, a nearly useless helmet, and an M16 rifle, after just six weeks of truly rudimentary basic training, to literally pray every day of being able to make it home alive, “back to the world”, as the saying went back then. It was a time when peoples' closest friends were sent far away, drafted against their will, before the internet, before social media communications, only able to communicate with back home by writing a letter on paper with a pen. The owner of Studio 2.8 photography participated in massive political demonstrations against that conscripted war, political events with crowds that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, or were sometimes smaller but still extraordinarily politically important. One such smaller but politically impactful demonstration was the May 4, 1970 anti-war demonstration at Kent State University, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, a place that was driving distance from Studio 2.8 photography’s owner’s high school home. During that political demonstration, Ohio National Guard troops shot and killed four (4) Kent State college students and injured nine (9) others. It is this historical backdrop, and other similar political events, such as the August 1968 Democratic National Convention where a huge political demonstration against the Vietnam War overwhelmed it, that informs the photographic eye that is the basis of the Studio 2.8 photography political photographic media craftwork.
From an early photographic tutelage, and an extended apprenticeship by experience, that began in the late 1960s with a Mamiya/Sekor 2000DTL brand 35mm single lens reflex film camera, an experience which has continued over the course of decades since then, with both film cameras, and more recently of course with state of the art digital photographic equipment, Studio 2.8 photography’s political photojournalism is the product of half a century of artistic and informational experience in the United States, observing American political history through a camera’s lens. It is from this foundation of experience and political integrity that Studio 2.8 photography produces difficult to obtain political event photographs. Regardless of risk, Studio 2.8 photography works to be in the political action, within mere feet of the subjects who create political events, recording what transpires, with keen framing that informs, with angles that amplify, and with photographic perspective that is hopefully perspicacious.