"Selfies Against the Death Penalty," is Rena Silverman's post at the New York Times' Lens blog. There are images at the post.
Marc Asnin’s latest project follows in the tradition of documentary photographers crusading for social justice. He just happens to employ selfies in his mission.
Through crowdfunding and social media, he has initiated a campaign in conjunction with the VII association against the death penalty in which he asks photographers to upload self-portraits to a website with a caption of 140 characters or fewer describing why they oppose capital punishment.
“The selfie is a modern-day way of showing a story,” Mr. Asnin said. “It’s not my generation, it’s not how I was trained to confront social injustice. But I’m not going to be a 51-year-old photographer who says I’m not going embrace that. That’s like burying your head in the sand.”
The campaign, “Photographers Selfie Against the Death Penalty,” is part of a larger project, a book called “Final Words,” which compiles 517 final statements of Texas’ death row prisoners. Their final words are combined with mug shots, summaries of the crime for which they were convicted and other details about the prisoners. Mr. Asnin hopes to get the book into classrooms in the 32 states that still have the death penalty on the books. He also intends to mount a traveling exhibition by the fall of 2015 that will include a multimedia projection.
Earlier news of Final Words is at the link. Related posts are in the books and culture category indexes.
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