Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”
“2020 has prompted a more profound acknowledgment of the fact that people who make news images much like people who write news stories, and people who run newsrooms are situated and partial.”
As unprecedented numbers of marchers pounded the pavement to protest racist police violence in 2020, expressing outrage at the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, some of the most impactful and widely circulated news images were, rather counterintuitively, views from above.
City streets themselves became sites for the inscription of protesters’ central message: street murals reading BLACK LIVES MATTER were painted in cities across the U.S. and beyond. And although the first of these murals was instigated by a municipal government rather than by a crowd of marchers D.C.’s Department of Public Works, not far from the White House groups of volunteers in multiple cities swiftly emulated its example, painting th
Nipsey Hussle is part of a mural painted by Moses Ball featuring other local notable people on the wall of a bank in the rapper s Hyde Park neighborhood. In the wake of Hussle s March 2019 death, many murals of the beloved Los Angeles musician were painted in the Hyde Park neighborhood near his Marathon Clothing store. Tara Pixley for NPR
I. Slauson and Crenshaw
Lisa P is from Crenshaw. She knows all its avenues, all its corners. She has it all mapped out in her head, what it means to move from one block to the next. She s 57 years old, and grew up running these streets. She was born Ellisa McKnight but prefers the nickname she s gone by since childhood.
Nipsey Hussle is part of a mural painted by Moses Ball featuring other local notable people on the wall of a bank in the rapper s Hyde Park neighborhood. In the wake of Hussle s March 2019 death, many murals of the beloved Los Angeles musician were painted in the Hyde Park neighborhood near his Marathon Clothing store. Tara Pixley for NPR
toggle caption Tara Pixley for NPR
Nipsey Hussle is part of a mural painted by Moses Ball featuring other local notable people on the wall of a bank in the rapper s Hyde Park neighborhood. In the wake of Hussle s March 2019 death, many murals of the beloved Los Angeles musician were painted in the Hyde Park neighborhood near his Marathon Clothing store.