FIRST DAY

From street level I could feel how big it was in my chest before I could really see it with my eyes. The energy sharpened everything. But visually, it started to feel small. Too many angles felt obvious. Too many lenses pointed the same way at the same signs. And if you know me, you know I’m not out there to remake the same frame as the next photographer.

We were living through a turning point, and I wanted to make a photograph that actually felt like one.

At some point, in all that noise, I heard the train overhead.

I had the shot in my head before I even saw the platform. I linked up with another photographer I knew in the crowd, pointed up, and basically said, “Yo, we gotta get up there and shoot this from above.”

Getting to the Green Line a few blocks over in time while cutting across a moving river of people who weren’t stopping was the only challenge. You either flowed with it, or you stalled.

By the time I made it up to the elevated platform, the march was already deep into downtown. I knew I had one shot at this. One pass over the crowd. One chance to line my body, the lens, and Jackson Boulevard up the way I’d already composed it in my mind.

I went out onto the gangway between two CTA cars on the Green Line — not inside the train, not behind the glass. Just that skinny strip of space with all the steel and grease, open to the winter air. Camera strap wrapped tight around my wrist. One hand locked on the rail, the other riding my settings as the train curved and picked up speed toward Wabash and Jackson.

Making my way back toward the core of the march, I could feel it coming before I saw it — the train swinging around turns, light peeking through and disappearing behind the buildings again. Different pockets of the city had crowd noise underneath, echoing up through the tracks. My position was set.

And then it opened up.

What felt chaotic and cramped from the street turned into something undeniable from above. The crowd read as one body, filling Jackson from edge to edge. Signs turned into texture. People became pattern. The noise turned into a single visible pulse that stretched down the block.

FIRST DAY is that moment — 1/2500 of a second where a quarter million people moving through downtown Chicago became a shape you can actually see.

Nobody out there was on a mission to catch the algorithm or perform for content. It was people using their feet and their First Amendment in public because they felt like something fundamental had just moved under them.

On paper, that day shows up in local news as a peaceful rally of more than 250,000 people, the largest Women’s March outside Washington, DC. That number matters.

Nearly a decade later, it doesn’t feel like a one-off. It feels like the first page of a chapter we’re still inside. The fears and warnings people were carrying on cardboard that day aged into reality over the next four years, then the next four after that. And if you look closely, the signs kind of saw it all before a lot of us did.

That’s why I treat FIRST DAY — and a lot of the photographs I made that afternoon — as public record, not nostalgia. It’s not a “remember when we marched?” poster. It’s proof that we really did show up and say something on the very first day of what turned into a long, exhausting era.

When people stand in front of the print, they start scanning it. Someone always finds something new a few seconds later. A sign they missed. A face looking straight up. A pocket of people halfway down the street. The photograph keeps opening the longer you sit with it.

FIRST DAY is printed on Moab Juniper Baryta Rag — a fiber-based baryta paper with a warm white base and exceptional tonal depth for black and white printing. Signed by the artist. Certificate of authenticity included with every print. Available in open editions and a limited collector edition.

Prints start at $100. Open editions in 8.5 × 11, 11 × 14, and 13 × 19. Collector editions in 17 × 22 (limited to 15) and 24 × 36 (limited to 7), individually numbered. Printed in Chicago.