
In mid-August of 2015, Ferguson, MO went through one of the most testing inter-community struggles any city has endured in modern American history. The outbreak was generated from recent racial tensions emerging in America at this time, specifically between the African American community and the nation’s law-enforcement.  With America’s rich slave history, still looming in the not so distant past, the country possesses a well-documented history of strong racial tension among its citizens. The unjust death of African American Michael Brown by a Ferguson policeman created outrage in the Ferguson community. Recent developments and dramatic improvements made in the internet industry has allowed nation’s news medium to make a new home on the World Wide Web.  Advancements in internet and technology, provide an outlet in which ordinary people possess the power to report news.  This new form of ordinary people generating news takes the power of deciding what is news and what is not out of the hands of the National media and into the hands of the masses.  This new medium of social media allowed the turmoil of a small American town to become national news in a matter of minutes. When determining what is news is in the hands of the people, the people will take advantage of it, and the people of Missouri took the Michael Brown incident and, with the help of social media, made it into a cultural movement that took the country by storm.  The racial tensions in Ferguson reached a breaking point during the week of August 12. 2014, when its citizens turned their struggles into action, and thousands took to the streets to participate in riots sparked by the oppression the African American community felt they were experiencing.  Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone placed himself directly in the heart of this turmoil and produced a photo essay filled with images from the eventful week in Ferguson that captures the true emotion and state of the Ferguson community in a way that a basic news article consisting of merely words would not be able to illustrate.  

The picture used as the cover photo for Dickinson’s Rolling Stone piece depicts an African American man with his arms outstretched, his head down, and his eyes closed. (Dickinson 1) The image is uncanny to that of perhaps the most influential religious figure of modern time, Jesus Christ.  Jesus on the cross is universally held as a symbol of suffering. The man in the picture is wearing a St Louis Blues hat, Missouri’s hockey team. By wearing this particular hat, the man goes further than representing the African American community, he represents the St. Louis and Ferguson community as a whole.  This image uses the universal symbol of Jesus Christ on a cross to portray African American’s suffering in Ferguson, and perhaps even in America.  Jesus is also used as a symbol of innocence; Dickinson uses the article’s cover photo to depict Ferguson’s people as victims. The image is taken in a very bright light, one that almost seems surreal. Both characteristics can correlate with the image representing Jesus, the brightness and dreamlike qualities in the image are both traits that are closely related with heaven and religion.  The unreal quality that the picture possesses represents the true state of strangeness that Ferguson was experiencing at the time, the place where day to day life is usually conducted transformed into one of the most extreme cultural protests in American history, seemingly overnight. The picture purposely focuses on one singular African American in the crowd, and makes him the central figure of the photo.  While much can be said about this man and the symbolism he represents, the out of focus parts of the image are almost just as telling.  The background illustrates the coming together of Ferguson’s African American community and the strength and beauty in uniting under a common cause. While the crowd looks to be taking the same peaceful stance as the photo’s subject, the bizarre mix of colors and strange light sources present in the background gives light to a sense of the true craziness present in Ferguson at the time.

A second image used in the photo essay shifts from focusing on the state of the African American community in Ferguson, and brings the actions of its police force into play. (Dickinson 2) The root of the turmoil taking place in Ferguson at this time stems from the relationship between its African American community and law enforcement. To combat the rioting, the American government provided Ferguson law enforcement with military equipment to subdue its irate inhabitants.  The picture illustrates the gear the police department had recently acquired and how they put it to use.  The crew of what seems to be about 10 officers is shown pointing their military grade weapons at an African American man standing with his hands up.  The picture captures the type of oppression and unjust treatment African American’s felt they were experiencing as a community.  Another motif the picture possesses is a phrase written on the most perfectly placed mailbox which read, “Fuck the Police”.  This phrase, coined by 90’s rap group NWA has been used in similar police versus African American social situations. (Billboard) The phrase says out loud what a lot of Ferguson citizens were thinking, the community believes the oppression caused by law enforcement has been drawn out long enough and a “Fuck the Police” mentality has been formed in the collective heads of the masses, which this particular image illustrates perfectly.  Since this article maintains the African American community as victims, it makes sense that the image portrays the African American man as the only entity the police crew could possibly be reacting to.  But, the reality of the situation is that we have no true way of knowing what the officers actually see in front of them that is making them take on a defensive (or possibly attacking) position; we only can see what the photographer wants us to see, a singular man being oppressed by a predominately white group of police officers.  While images provide viewers with a vast amount of information, they leave viewers with much room for interpretation.  This particular image, standing alone, is a perfect symbol of black oppression at the hands of the law enforcement, but if the photographer were to the police officers’ viewpoint in either this image or a completely different photo, the interpretation of the image, and the entire article could change drastically. 

The final image shows two distressed women, cleaning up the remains of a recently looted convenience store. (Dickinson 3) These two standout Ferguson citizens are doing their part as friendly neighbors in the midst of the chaos surrounding them and their community.  The photographer captures this image through a broken convenience store window, presumably a result of the recent rioting.  The rioting in Ferguson affected many people in many different ways.  At the heart of the protest, the people partaking in the riots meant well, but the people felt disrespected and searched for an outlet to displace their frustrations and rioting emerged as the perfect stage to assert these feelings.  While most national media attention had its eyes on the actual rioting itself, what was lost in the midst of this coverage was the fallout of the rioting and how citizens of Ferguson were affected by it.  The photograph of the two distressed women attending to the recently looted convenience store sheds light on the amount of strength and resiliency that lies within the people of Ferguson.  The state of the store represents the state of Ferguson Missouri itself:  The wreckage and disarray of the store correlates with the wreckage and disarray of the entire community.  The resiliency of the women in the picture represents the resiliency of the people of Ferguson who, in the midst of a struggle unlike anything they’ve ever seen, stand by the values of civility and selflessness in order to preserve and to eventually better the community of Ferguson.  

There’s a reason the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”, is so popular. While words and language are the foundation of communication and expression among humans, by comparison images possess a higher level of complexity than that of words.  In every image there is meaning, but what this meaning is can be left up for interpretation.  Photographs captures specific moments in time and captures the entire range of emotions and scenery of a situation in such an absolute way that using just words to describe the same event wouldn’t do it justice. For a week in August of 2014 Ferguson had the eyes of the nation observing them as they enacted and endured through of the most violent and hectic protests in American history.  The people of Ferguson went through the type of event that was so complex that words would not properly give justice to the magnitude and density of the event as a whole.  Tom Dickinson took himself into the heart of the struggle in Ferguson and captured images that give insight into the wide range of emotions that its citizens were experiencing at this time.  
