CONVOKE
ACCRA SHEPP
Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice
THE BRIEF
Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice was developed to reposition photographer Accra Shepp’s practice for renewed gallery, institutional, and critical engagement. The goals were to secure gallery representation, develop exhibition opportunities, pursue grants and awards, expand museum visibility, and create a stronger public platform for both his photography and writing.
THE EDITORIAL IDEA
A Portrait of a Society in Motion
I brought together Accra Shepp’s portraits from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 with his photographs of the racial justice protests of 2020 to create a visual thread between two distinct moments of social and political upheaval. Seen together, the photographs become more than documentation of individual movements; they form a sustained portrait of a society—its aspirations, contradictions, resilience, and evolving ideas of justice and collective action.
The project draws on the tradition of photographers such as August Sander, whose systematic approach to portraiture used individual faces and social types to construct a broader portrait of society and its values. In Shepp’s work, however, the street becomes the social landscape, and protest becomes the context through which individuals reveal themselves. The photographs are not simply portraits made during moments of political action; they are portraits shaped by those moments.
Bringing 2011 and 2020 into conversation allows the individual photographs to speak across time. Bodies, gestures, expressions, signs, and environments begin to form visual rhymes, revealing both continuity and change between the two periods. The resulting dialogue suggests that a society can be understood through the people who step forward to represent it.
In this sense, portraiture becomes more than a record of who was present at a particular moment. It becomes a visual language through which a culture reveals what it believes, what it challenges, and what it hopes to become.
VOICES & SEQUENCE
Bringing Two Moments into Conversation
In bringing two distinct moments in Shepp’s career into conversation, I also wanted to place his work within a broader dialogue with peers and cultural thinkers. I invited Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, to write the introduction, One Big Swarm of People, and asked Shepp to follow with a personal narrative that would extend the conversation from critical context into lived experience.
Beyond these two voices, I wanted the book to include perspectives from cultural leaders who could speak to the significance of both bodies of work. Hilton Als, Dawoud Bey, Makeda Best, and Cornel West generously contributed their reflections. Their endorsements appear on the back cover, providing an immediate sense of the book’s cultural and intellectual context while reinforcing its larger ambition: to function not simply as a collection of photographs, but as a portrait of the society in which these images were made.
Sequencing became the primary design tool for allowing the viewer to discover continuities, differences, and recurring questions around visibility, dignity, protest, and collective action. The chronology is established through Roman numerals, giving the book a clear temporal structure while allowing the images themselves to complicate that linear progression. Chapter taglines create points of departure within the chronology, allowing ideas and visual relationships to move across time rather than remaining confined to a single historical moment.
The result is a structure that asks the reader to move between history and association—to recognize what has changed, what remains unresolved, and how individual images can continue a conversation across decades.
Occupying Wall Street
Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular. Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.
COVID Journals: Justice
The pandemic sits like a cairn marking a trail through our collective memory. The outward aspects of this marker are not momentous, just a haphazard pile of discarded worries and fears, concern about cloth masks versus paper masks, dim recollections of isolation and ambulance sirens, the smell of hand sanitizer. It does, however, mark a threshold in contemporary history where we collectively faced our responsibility to each other – to reflect upon the idea long denied by social norms that our own personal welfare is connected to the welfare of not only our neighbors but also those we hardly know and especially those we try to not to know.
Shepp’s images of this spasm in New York City form the “Justice” chapter of his multi-part project, “The Covid Journals.” It was the pandemic that provided the context for our ability to perceive something we had long tried not to. In our isolation, no one could escape the obvious and shameful brutality encapsulated in the act. It laid bare the history of old and senseless racial hatreds, but in a truly remarkable turn of events everyone united to reject it. Shepp’s images reflect the first few months of this historic response.
THE BOOK AS OBJECT
I approached the book as a traditional photography monograph: a cloth-bound, embossed hardcover wrapped in a dust jacket. The format and dimensions were established after the initial layouts, with particular attention to how two distinct bodies of work—one composed in a 4 × 5 format and the other in a square format—could coexist within a single object. The final proportions were also informed by the practical considerations of standard bookstore shelving, postage, and overall production costs.
For production, I selected a renowned Italian printing house whose expertise I trusted, particularly in the reproduction and color translation of gelatin silver prints. Their technical capabilities, experience with fine-art photography, and ability to produce the various components of the book at an appropriate cost made them an ideal partner for the project.
The choice of cloth was, in part, shaped by the realities of production during COVID. Material availability was extremely limited at the time of printing, so rather than treating the constraint as a compromise, we selected the gray cloth that most closely complemented the tonal range of the photographs. It was paired with a traditional blue-silver foil, creating a restrained and tactile cover that allowed the photography to remain the primary focus.
For the dust jacket, I wanted to introduce a more immediate visual interruption. We selected a bold, traffic-light yellow—a color that carries an almost instinctive signal of attention and change. Rather than pairing it with the expected black, we chose a deep blue. The combination retained the graphic impact of yellow and black while introducing a more sophisticated and elevated quality that connected back to the book’s overall palette.
The front cover developed quite naturally from a desire for an image that could immediately communicate presence, fortitude, and courage. The photograph of the three men was allowed to bleed off the bottom edge of the cover, creating the subtle sensation that the viewer is entering the photograph rather than simply looking at it. It is a small detail that can easily go unnoticed, but it was essential to the success of the cover’s intentionally simple relationship between image and title.
The title, Radical Justice, emerged from a conversation between the artist and myself. The word Radical was used in the inaugural call for Occupy Wall Street, “Alright, you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there.” Justice is one of the subtitles for Shepp’s COVID Journal project so we thought it natural to combine those two words. I felt, however, that the book needed a secondary phrase to communicate the inclusivity at the heart of Shepp’s humanitarian approach to photography. Protest photography is often framed through a singular or confrontational perspective; Lifting Every Voice offered a broader and more human dimension to the project. The phrase was suggested by the artist’s mother, and ultimately became the perfect complement to the title—bringing the book to a more expansive, inclusive, and ultimately hopeful conclusion.
BEYOND THE BOOK
To satisfy the goal of expanding Shepp’s fine art reach to gallery, museum, and higher eduction acquisitions, we created two fine art print portfolios. Both portfolios come in a custom dark gray clothbound clamshell box with silver lettering in editions of 25.
IMPACT & LEGACY
Since its publication, the book has helped expand the visibility and institutional recognition of Shepp’s work. Shepp is now represented by Von Lintel Gallery and has placed work in museum collections across the United States.
The book has also served as the foundation for several major exhibitions built around the original edit and its central themes, including Pictures of Us: Dissent, Discontent, & Action at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; Blues People at Newark Express; the International Center of Photography’s American Job 1940–2011 exhibition; and Bearing Witness at the Cincinnati Biennial in 2026. These exhibitions extended the project beyond the book, allowing its sequencing and visual argument to be reconsidered within institutional and exhibition contexts.
I also pursued an editorial strategy that brought the project into broader public discourse. Salamishah Tillet’s introduction was published as an op-ed in The Nation, while Accra Shepp’s essay appeared in The New York Times, alongside an op-ed in the New York Review of Books. Together, this coverage expanded the conversation around the work beyond the photography world and positioned the project within a larger cultural and political dialogue.
The publication also contributed to a significant period of professional recognition for Shepp, including his selection for the prestigious Cullman Fellowship at The New York Public Library in 2023 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 2024.
The portfolios represented in the book have since entered the collections of Harvard Art Museums, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Smithsonian, and several private collections. What began as an effort to bring two distinct periods of Shepp’s practice into conversation has therefore continued to evolve as a living body of work—moving from the book, into exhibitions, collections, critical discourse, and new institutional contexts.
