I’m David Dyer-Bennet, and these are my photos. I’ve been a photographer since second grade. My interests are basically “documentary”, but that can range from people doing things (photojournalism, events, sports, snapshots) to
stuff looking interesting (landscape, macro, cats, portraits, scientific, nature).
George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police officers on 25-May-2020. Shortly after that, windows got protected with sheets of plywood (or OSB), and quickly became canvases for multiple layers of slogans, art, memorials and mourning, war cries, special pleading, hope, and despair, by the building owners or tenants, their agents, and neighborhood residents.
And that I have found fascinating.
I’ve lived in South Minneapolis for nearly all of the last 40 years. The killing happened a mile from my house, at an intersection I pass through many times a week. The Cub and Target over by 3rd Precinct are where most of my shopping happened, and is a mile north of a previous place I lived. 5th Precinct and the Post Office and Wells Fargo that got burned are a mile north of me. I lived just around the corner from where Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore was burned (and have known the owner since the 1970s). This is all familiar territory, right where I live.
Minneapolis has experienced much distress. We are being forced to confront issues we’ve let slide for too long (or that our work has not usefully improved). There is a huge amount of anger, of course, both immediate and accumulated over decades and centuries. There is despair. There are even some tendrils of hope.
I’m not the person to deal with the big issues here. I’ll keep listening, and I’ll keep voting and pressuring my representatives to do what seems right, but I’m not a leader in any of this.
The visual changes to the city around me are striking, and as an artist I’m responding to that.
