Field Notes #003
No Kings Day Protest
March 28th, 2026
Weather: H:42 L:32 & H:53 L:40 (Bright and clear conditions)
Camera: Nikon F4 50mm/ Canon F1 28mm/ Rollieflex 3.5f/ Nikon D850 1-300mm
Film Stock: Kodak Ultramax 400, Ilford 400 Delta, Fujifilm 400, Fujifilm 400 Pro H
Saturday morning, the 28th. I woke up early again. My body clock refuses to let me sleep past 5:30 for some reason. The usual breakfast of Cafe Bustello and a cigarette. It’s a nice morning today, a brisk air circles overhead as I take a seat in the backyard. The birds above my apartment that have created their nest are fighting with a larger bird trying to invade their home. Settlers…. Sirens blare off in the distance like usual.
I’ve had too much on my mind recently. My fathers health, my mother stress, my own stress and the world around me. Most mornings I can’t help but think about the weight of everyone and everything around me. Time passes by in the blink of an eye and Sophie wakes from her slumber downstairs as I’m pouring her first cup of coffee and my second. The sun is just rising into our apartment in Brooklyn as she swishes open our blinds to let a bit of the morning light into the apartment, cracking the front and back windows a bit so the air seeps into our living room and office. Some fresh air. Maybe that’s all I’ve needed.
We talk about how one another slept the night prior over a cup of black coffee and proceed to head into the backyard for a smoke. Our two furry boys Milo and Augustus follow tightly behind our ankles, rolling around on the concrete as they chirp at the birds returning home for spring. Suddenly, all the worry is gone, and what now resides is a mental checklist of things that need to get done.
Every Saturday for the past month, I’ve been mentoring a 13 year old kid in photography. Over the past month we’’ve been able to go out and shoot twice and today will be the third. He takes photography classes in school but, like I’ve mentioned in many of my lessons before, traditional photography classes don’t do a very good job of building a persons visual language.
He tells me constantly about how it takes them three weeks to develop a roll of film. How the cameras they shoot on are Holgas, which if you’re unfamiliar are plastic pieces of shit (I’m sure I’ll catch some flak for that), with plastic lenses and only allow 16 shots of film. He never shoots in color, only black and white. He has no real clue about the technical aspects of photography because Holgas are not proper cameras to learn on. He has no historical references because they don’t teach that. I’ve been letting him use my Rollei 35AF, which, to be fair, is just a point and shoot camera but at least got 36 shots to a roll. I’ve been giving him free film, which when he brought the camera in to his teacher, took a fuckin shot on the camera of a wall… Fucking men...
Even then, that small box of a camera wasn’t good enough. It’s a pancake, no interchangeable lens, no real settings. I wanted to change that.
I left for my lesson at 9:30 to stop by Nice Film Club here in Brooklyn before hand. I needed to pick up and drop off film. They gifted me some film because I wrote them an article here on Substack about the importance of film photography and printing. A moment that made me think for once, maybe I am a relatively good writer, and maybe I do know what I’m talking about.
I walked in and talked with Francis for a bit at the front desk while I perused the film options, selecting more Kodak Ultramax 400, Ilford 400 Delta, and Fuji 400, before picking up my sleeved negatives and checking out. Before I left, I packed my cameras with film, walked out the door and shook hands with Reggie, an older Puerto Rican man that owns a studio right next to the film lab. Him and I became acquaintances a couple weeks ago as I saw him working on his art work outside and asked if I could photograph him. I showed him the photographs I made of him and his work and he was thrilled, his bright blue eyes danced in the sun as a smile spread across his face. He then offered me an old Nikon camera that he’s had since the 60’s or 70’s for $120. I told him I’d think on it, but that regardless I want to print the photos out for him so he can hang them in the studio.
I was running late, one of my biggest pet peeves. I told the kid I’d meet him at K&E camera shop in the LES. I hopped on the L, transfered to the F at 6th ave and then got off at Delancey- Essex, passing ICP, a variety of over priced coffee shops swarmed with people my age all dressed like they’re attending New York Fashion week shows, drinking the greenest matchas and flakiest croissants you could imagine. I must have looked like the antithesis to their personality. Unwashed hair that’s grown too long shoved into a $10 Yankees cap I bought a year ago from one of those NYC merchandise stores on Canal St. that’s been cut up, a brown sun faded leather jacket I’ve had for 5 years that I’m not really sure has ever been washed, a pair of brown pants that are a bit too big, my girlfriends sweater, my girlfriends belt, and a pair of brown boots my mom got me for Christmas two years ago because they’re one of the only pairs of boots that she could find that fit me. Cigarette in mouth, the Nikon F4, Canon F1, Nikon d850, and Rolleiflex 3.5f, all wrapped around my body with the backpack I used in high school holding all my film, constraining my torso.
Walking down Orchid Street, I take my first photograph of the day outside one of the local apparel stores that’s been there for years that always has a crowd outside of employees and their buddies smoking doobies and playing music. A small shrine had been placed for what I assumed was the loss of one of their friends.
After a brief moment of paying respect, I continue down Orchid, where the kid is sitting on the bench outside of K&E, waiting on me since I was 5 minutes late. He didn’t care. In all honesty, it’s hard to tell if this kid cares about anything. Regardless, we say our hellos as usual then I tell him today’s the day we get him his first real camera. I come to K&E often, not always to buy anything, but because of a very specific man. Don, a NYC photography legend in my eyes who’s been photographing and working the city of New York, far before I was even thought of, works behind the camera counter. I don’t really remember how we became acquainted with one another on the level that we are. I bought my Nikon F4 from him, but that was well after we started spending hour long conversations shooting the shit, both disregarding work every time I came in. He knows just about every NYC photographic legend you could think of personally. Last time I was in he was showing me pictures of him and Jamel Shabazz together.
Don has had back surgery so he kind of hobbles. He’s borderline bald if not fully. He wears these circular glasses that sit at the very tip of his nose that I’m always concerned are going to drop off his face every time he looks down. The team at K&E are mixed with young kids about my age that all have this weird timidness about them, and old NYC vets like Don that have that sort of classic NYC attitude that can be very off putting if you’re not used to dry humor, sarcasm and foul language. They have almost any camera you can think of, ranging from point and shoots, SLRs, DSLRs, medium format, large format, every lens you could think of, scraps of junk lenses for $35 that don’t work, camera straps, film stocks, lens covers, camera straps. You get the picture. It’s basically a one stop shop photography emporium.
I knew exactly what kind of camera I was gonna get the kid. We perused for fun a bit, or at least I did. The kid kinda stood behind me the whole time not saying anything. I bent down to take a look at the selection of cameras I was thinking for him and right in front of me sat the perfect choice. The Canon AE-1 Program. One of the best starter film cameras any new film photographer could ask for. My first film camera was the Canon A1. I selected the camera, got him a nifty fifty, a lens cap and a free camera strap, shook hands with Don as he took a sip of his extra large Dunkin iced coffee, then headed out the door.
I asked the kid if he wanted to shoot B&W or color, to which he replied in his usual, “I don’t know, I don’t care”. Fair enough. I taught him how to load in some Fuji 400 and then hit the streets. Walking through Orchid through Chinatown.
I’m not really sure if we could ask for a better day outside. It was bright and clear, the temperature was perfect, people from all over flocked to the streets, filling each sidewalk we strolled down and every corner we stopped on. But in ways I can’t begin to describe in words, I knew that despite it being perfect outside, despite an uncountable amount of people filling the streets, there was simply nothing happening.
Call me old fashioned, but in todays world, no one gives a fuck anymore. Everyone is dressed the same, acts the same, talks the same. They copy each others clothes, their hair, their mannerisms, all coming from the same factory of personality that’s been rebranded by online symptoms of FOMO. It’s a New York that one can be pessimistic about, one that I’m sure most people that’ve been here for the last 50-60 years only find small moments in which they recognize the city they grew up in. I don’t know, call it nostalgia, or a refusal to evolve, but the people that complain about how gross and dirty New York is wouldn’t even begin to imagine just how clean it is compared to how it used to be. The NYC I knew growing up was “Do the Right Thing”, “GoodFellas”, “Downtown 81”, “A Bronx Tale”. I grew up listening to Big L, NAS, Mobb Deep, Wu Tang, A Tribe Called Quest, Biggie, Jay Z, Fat Joe, Missy Elliot, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, among many others. I live on the same block that Basquait did when he got hit by that car when he was 7. This was the NYC that I’ve always known, where your identity was harmonious with the city, and it was unique because the city was unique. A place where there’s numerous ways you can choose to earn funds and you’re taught who’s world it is.
When you’re around that many people, ALL the time, you can tell within about 30 minutes if it’s gonna be a good day or not. Today was not one of those good days. A stretch of the legs from Chinatown, through Canal, up SoHo, through Washington Square Park, onto 6th, then onto 7th, allllll the way up until Penn Station warranted only a couple photographs. I don’t know if it’s just me growing as an artist or what, but not a single thing stood out to me the entire time. I know when I’m off my game, today was not one of those days.
We high tailed it over to Times Square and began shooting around Midtown, hitting 6th Ave shortly after realizing there was nothing going on at Times Square. This is where I made the first photograph I was happy with of the day.
From 6th, we walked into central park because I knew from last year that the cherry blossoms had bloomed. It was around this time that I noticed the kid checked out. We were only an hour into our session. Now. I’m over ten years into my photographic journey. In a literal sense, I’m a professional, this is what I make money off of. My income is solely dependent on my social media and photography. Over my time as a photographer, I’ve grown much more selective. It’s not harder for me to find moments to be curious about, but I’d say that it takes a lot more for me to press the shutter than when I first started off. The kid hasn’t taken a single photograph the whole time. When I was his age, I photographed literally any and everything. I was already obsessed. The kid has no passion sometimes. Not just about photography, but about everything. I’m really really trying to break him out of his shell because he’s seriously shelled up. In the moment I try not to let it bother me so much and continue shooting as we walk back to 5th and 59th.
After hanging around Grand Army lLaza for a bit we begin walking down 5th ave where I teach him about fishing.
We hit nearly every corner of 5th before making our way down to Bryant Park.
The next hour goes by, and before we know it, the session is over. I drop him back off at Times Square and then make my back back up to Central Park south to prepare for the third national “No Kings Protest”. I’ve photographed the previous two and knew that given the extensive damage that our president has done since then, that today’s protest would be even larger then the previous two.
October 2025
February 2026
Boy oh boy. The idea I had in my head about how many people would turn out for this protest were blown out of the water. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded 7th and Broadway. Both filled to the absolute brim with people. I can’t even begin to describe how many people were pressed up against one another and just how little space on the road and sidewalks there was to move. I knew that navigating the protest was going to be a borderline nightmare, and that my usual tactics of slipping in and out of the sidelines looking for moments wasn’t going to warrant any good photographs for the way that I shoot. Each side of the street was blocked by a wall of press photographers, cheering crowd members that didn’t want to walk, and a flurry of pedestrian tourists that just had their vacations ruined by this massive demonstration.
As the rest of the press photographers were busy photographing Robert De Niro at the start of the parade, I took the time to enter into the people in the streets. Call me radical, but celebrities don’t interest me. I love that he has a great message and that he’s out there with us, but he’s just another dude to me. Real NYC icon and a great guy. I just don’t need his photograph. He’s not an idol to the movement and revolution because he’s an elite. After the protest, I’m sure he goes home to a real nice house and live the life he’s built. By no means am I trying to dilute his amazing work that he’s made or the ways in which he’s spoken up about the wrong doings of our government, but to me, it’s the people that struggle to make ends meet, the ones being truly effected by the things going on around our country that are out there regardless of age, or financial disparity making their voices be heard that matter the most to me. So I weasel my way through the dormant crowd up and down a few times before the march kicks off.
At 2 people begin marching. A loud swelling cheer erupts from the crowd as they move forward slowly inch by inch. It’s all out chaos. Typically, only press photographers are allowed on the streets at the front of these marches so that organizers can have a clear path for the marches to travel forward. But because it was so busy, people were still flooded into the streets leaving very little room to even see the start of the march. I knew it was a crap shoot trying to get any shots of the start because what press photographers were already there were being pushed further and further back by organizers.
I turned my attention to the crowd diving in and out of the sidelines, paying attention to the people watching the march take place from their perspective.
I walked down to Times Square again a bit overwhelmed by the amount of people surrounding me on all sides. I couldn’t get to the sidelines like I had in previous demonstrations. Everywhere I went I was practically trapped. So I did the sensible thing and firmly planted myself in the middle of the street. If I was overwhelmed I was going to face it head on. I wanted to convey just how tightly packed this experience was. The march slowly but surely reached me as I shifted in and out of the rolling tides of bodies passing me.
After staying put near Times Square for what felt like an eternity, I eventually squeezed my way onto Broadway to take a smoke break and continue down 7th to the end of the march on 34th street before ending the day.
By the end of the day, I had walked 22,951 steps and over 10 miles. I dropped my film off at Nice, grabbed a smoothie on the way home and then went out that night for all you can eat sushi over in Long Island City.
My brain is so fried that I can’t even begin to write a proper conclusion to the day so this it is.
Thank you for reading this edition of Field Notes.
Field Notes is an ongoing diary of my days spent photographing New York City. Each entry documents where I went, what cameras and film I used, the weather, the people I encountered, and the small moments that caught my attention along the way. It’s part record keeping, part reflection. A way of preserving not just the photographs themselves, but the circumstances, thoughts, and emotions surrounding them.
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Links:
They protest "No kings," yet they're not protesting the people who have been in the government for over 40 years, like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and others.
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/no-kings-or-running-on-trump-derangement
Great work on capturing the rally. We didn't have quite that big of a crowd in Lansing, Michigan, but the people showed up with bells on.