September 30, 2011, Occupy Dewey Square
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Camp Dewey thrived between September 30 and December 10 of last year. Through rain and snow, raids and General Assemblies, a motley group of characters built their own alternative community and kept it alive — and I've got 6,000 photos to prove it. In recent weeks I tracked down five familiar faces from Occupy Boston to find out where and how they spend their time now, a year after the encampment.
NADEEM MAZEN, 28 ROLE AT OCCUPY: MEDIA
HOW HAS OCCUPY IMPACTED YOUR LIFE — FOR BETTER, WORSE, OR NOT AT ALL? "It's definitely impacted my life for the better. I learned a lot. . . . We've learned how movements can arise. And it's very different to look at something from afar. To look at the Tea Party, or to look at some other movement that grows, or is co-opted, or is corrupted, or fails, or succeeds. It's a very different thing to be in the thick of it, to really live that day to day — an incredible education, I think, for everyone that came down to Dewey, whether for the day or for a month."
THEN (above) "We were beginning to take the square after having decided to gung-ho it at a series of planning meetings in the Boston Common . . . kind of flying by the seat of our pants, trying to figure out what we'd gotten ourselves into."
August 21, 2012 |
NOW "Here I'm in the nimblebot.com office working with the other founders, also Occupy participants. Our work has been greatly informed by Occupy — we've recently taken two months off from for-profit commercial work in order to create a campaign-advertisement fact-checking app called reactvid.com."
