CULTURE FILES // No Gods, No Masters
by Walter Foley. Photos by Ford Fischer
EXCERPT //
On July 4, 2020, Ford Fischer filmed a rally near the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, where around 200 people were protesting gun-control laws as well as police violence.1 Armed Black Lives Matter protesters marched alongside a group of Boogaloo Bois—a loosely organized anti-government movement identifiable by its members’ mixture of Hawaiian shirts and combat gear.
Fischer has been filming single-shot, unedited footage of protests all over the U.S.—left-wing and right-wing;
pro-police and anti-police—while streaming it to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube simultaneously. Raw footage, he believes, can be used to hold high-profile news outlets accountable if they edit something out of context.
“My philosophy is: When you convert anything into any kind of medium, it essentially becomes fiction,” Fischer, 26, told me over a video call in January. “You have to acknowledge that, and then you should try to use your medium to subvert the fictionalizing element of [the] medium.”
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