Picture credit: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters
A photo showing a woman making a peaceful stand against armed police officers at the Black Lives Matter protest in America has been shared around the world on social media and news sites, and praised by key figures as ‘powerful’ and symbolic.
The protests around the US started on Sunday in response to violent incidents between police and African American people, which included the killing by police of two black men: Philando Castile in St Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Hundreds of protesters have so far been arrested in protests around the country, leading to calls by both authorities and protest leaders for calm.
The photograph was taken from outside the Baton Rouge police headquarters by Jonathan Bachman, who was taking images for Reuters at the time. The woman, who has been named by the Daily Mail as 28-year-old nurse and mother Ieshia Evans, was subsequently detained by police, but has now been released.
The image has been picked up by news outlets throughout the world, including CNN, the BBC and Mail Online.
Shaun King, Senior Justice Writer at New York Daily News, who has been updating his Twitter followers on Evans’ story, hailed the image as ‘powerful’.
It has also been shared by other key figures on the social media accounts, and is already being described as ‘iconic’ and compared with the ‘Tank Man’ image of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China, where an unidentified man stood in front of a line of tanks.
In an interview with www.theatlantic.com, the photographer, Bachman, said that to him the image was representative of the peaceful demonstrations that have been carried out in Baton Rouge so far.
