Portland State Magazine

WITNESS TO PROTEST: JOSEPH BLAKE JR. With the end of senior year in sight, Joseph Blake Jr. had almost achieved his goal of becoming a frst-generation college graduate when the country went into lockdown because of COVID-19. “I was super scared,” says the social science major from Portland. He stayed home with his family, expecting his last term to pass quickly. But less than two weeks before fnal exams, video footage of the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed in police custody in Minneapolis, whipped across the internet. Everything changed. “Although there was a pandemic going on, racism had been going on for me and my life and my family for hundreds of years,” he says. “I knew I had to be a part of the protests, whether or not I paid the price. I knew I needed to be there.” When he left home, he brought his camera.Troughout college, Blake had a side business creating photography and music videos. He was used to seeing the world through a lens. Te frst day, he looked down at the unrest in Pioneer Courthouse Square from the roof of a parking garage, stunned by what was happening. As he posted images to social media, he wrote about what the protests meant to him as a Black man from Portland. “People started communicating with me and saying ‘thank you for sharing your voice,’” he says. “I wanted to see where this would go.” So week after week, Blake bore witness to what became the longest period of sustained protests in Portland’s history. He captured the passion on the streets as well as dramatic shots from above taken with a drone. His photographs show police standing in bright shards of broken glass at the entrance to Louis Vuitton; protesters surging across the Morrison Bridge; artists transforming plywood-covered downtown windows into murals; and the clouds of tear gas that soon billowed around the Multnomah County Justice Center nightly (see his Instagram @pdxwulf_). As his posts circulated—one video has been viewed more than 38,000 times on Twitter—local media took notice. Blake’s photos have appeared in the Willamette Week,Te Oregonian and Portland Monthly Magazine.

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// PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE