Image From Baton Rouge Is 'Impossible to Forget'

Police in riot gear arrest woman in flowing dress
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 11, 2016 6:25 AM CDT
Image From Baton Rouge Is 'Impossible to Forget'
This is a different angle of the incident as seen in a photo by the AP's Max Becherer. The photo going viral was shot by Jonathan Bachman of Reuters.   (AP Photo/Max Becherer)

One image from the Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend seems destined for icon status. It was taken by Jonathan Bachman of Reuters—see it here, via tweet—and it shows police officers in Baton Rouge clad in riot gear arresting a woman in a flowing dress on Saturday. (The above photo is an alternative angle taken by an AP photographer.) The woman has not been identified, but her image has been shared over and over on social media. A sample of reaction:

  • "There are images that are impossible to forget, searing themselves into our collective consciousness," writes Yoni Appelbaum at the Atlantic. "One man staring down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. A high school student attacked by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama. This is such a photo."

  • From the photographer: “That was the first image I transferred [to Reuters] because I knew it was going to be an important photo,” Bachman tells BuzzFeed. "She was there, she wasn’t resisting, and she had every intention of not moving.”
  • "POWERFUL," wrote Shaun King of the New York Daily News, whose posting of the photo on Facebook has been shared more than 30,000 times. King later tweeted after speaking with her friends that the woman has been released from jail and has a 5-year-old son.
  • "Starling juxtaposition," notes a post at Mashable, which rounds up tweets about the image.
  • "Grace under pressure," writes British-Indian novelist Hari Kunzru, one of the reactions outside the US cited by the BBC.
(More Black Lives Matter stories.)

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