San Francisco and Chicago, January 2012 | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

San FranciscoStop the violenceBerkeley a.m.The Bay Bridge (1)The Bay Bridge (2)The Bay Bridge (3)
The hills of San Francisco (1)The hills of San Francisco (2)Anti-torture reunionWinter windowsSnow in ChicagoGuantanamo in Chicago
Chicago skylinePolice line - Do not crossChicago at nightSam's Restaurant, Brooklyn

Earlier this week, I posted the first two sets of photos on my new Flickr account. The first set was of of my wanderings in New York in January, at the start of my two-week US tour to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, and the second was of the protests in Washington D.C. on the 10th anniversary, January 11, when it poured with rain, but our spirit was strong.

This third set concludes the photos of my trip, taken in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley during a one-day visit to the Bay Area, and in Chicago during another brief visit (my first ever to the Windy City), before flying back to New York, and 24 hours in Brooklyn preceding the long flight home.

Regular readers may well have seen my reports from my US trip, and perhaps even watched and listened to some of the many videos and audio files of the events, TV appearances and radio shows I took part in during what was a very intensive tour organised by my friend and colleague, the indefatigable Debra Sweet, the national director of The World Can’t Wait.

These photos occasionally cross over into that world, which, at its busiest, left me with barely a moment when I wasn’t either talking to someone in person, or on a cellphone, and they are sometimes just glimpses of what I could see during the journeys I undertook to take part in the various events, but they also chronicle a different journey I took across America, as a photographer reunited with a camera for the first time in many years, and I hope that they provide readers with a number of perspectives that might not always be apparent from my writing.

These are my observations, in which I use my eyes rather than my words, and frame what I see rather than what I think, although the same sensibility no doubt infuses both methods of communication. Both are probably an attempt to make sense of the world, or to capture it, to mark its passing, to commemorate it, although I haven’t analyzed it too deeply, as I’m rather enjoying letting the camera’s lens take me on a journey, accompanying me wherever I go these days, and providing a refreshing break from the words that otherwise possess me.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.