TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image presents How We Stay Free

The exhibition documents local protest over time through photographers Mike Arrison, Harvey Finkle, and Joe Piette, with filmmaker Sunny Singh. Pictures spanning the past 60 years reveal a surprising consistency in what drives people into the streets.

Plunging into the crowd

Unlike news coverage, which emphasizes numbers, images here plunge us into the crowd, to see individuals demanding change. Finkle often centers on a child, as in Balled Up (c 2013), in which a small boy at a disability rights protest sits wide-eyed, knees to chest. Shooting through protesters, Finkle framed him in a silhouette of wheelchairs. We wonder who he’s with, and what he’s thinking. Poverty USA (2000) resulted when Finkle spotted a little girl peering through broken window blinds. Taped to the glass above her head is an American flag.

Fifty-four years ago, Finkle, a Philadelphia native, left social work to become a photographer full-time. Since then he’s turned a sympathetic lens on seemingly everyone fighting for social justice. Disability rights are especially close to Finkle, as his two children were born deaf. Demonstration in support of captioned movies (1993) shows a signer’s forearms and hands from behind, as he addresses a sidewalk crowd. Also in the frame is a woman sitting on the ground, listening and holding a sign: “Deaf People [heart] The Movies Too.”

The crosshairs of confrontation

Piette stood between lines of Philadelphia bicycle police and yelling, gesturing protesters for Line Up – No White Supremacists in Philly Protest (2018). In Don’t – MLK March (2015), he photographed a young Asian marcher carrying a sign with “Hand up Don’t Shoot” in English and Chinese.

Labor and immigration issues also draw Piette’s attention. As a child, he came to the United States from Canada and later served in Vietnam, and worked as a letter carrier for 30 years. Union! (2022) depicts a workers’ rights march at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Early this year, Piette captured local opposition to businesses’ cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps in Cost of ICE (2026) and Target ICE (2026).

Capturing campus activists

Arrison covered campus unrest in the series The Death of UArts (2024) and The Penn Encampments for Gaza (2022). The Face of Our Demise is a visual narrative of tumult caused by UArts’s unexpected closure. Students, staff, and faculty fill the steps of Hamilton Hall. Sketches are posted of administrators viewed as villains, and handheld signs are all the caption needed: “What happened to the $67 million from 2022?” and “UARTS DESERVED BETTER...STOP SIDELINING ARTISTS.”

The UArts anguish is embodied in Arrison’s Strike a Pose, in which a woman stands in a twisting crouch in the middle of South Broad Street, with City Hall towering in the distance. The composition echoes Finkle’s image of an Americans with Disabilities Act rally in 2000 in front of the Supreme Court building. In it, Kelby Brick speaks and gestures emphatically as the familiar neoclassical columns rise over his shoulder.

At Penn’s 2022 Gaza encampment, Arrison photographed negotiations between students and university representatives and separately, a statue of university founder Benjamin Franklin with a keffiyeh tied around its neck. At a later demonstration, Arrison shot Revolutionary Fury – The Palestinian Genocide (2024), a low-angle image of a speaker exhorting the crowd. Arrison, a Philadelphia native who first photographed protest at the Occupy encampment in 2011, says he’s drawn to the beauty of truth told to power.

Amplifying the everyman

When power brokers move and shake, photojournalists record the groundswell. The continued failure of Pennsylvania’s legislature to increase the minimum wage is illustrated by Piette’s Supersized (2014), depicting a protest outside a Philadelphia McDonald’s, where signs complain “Supersize my Wage!” and “The CEO of McDonald’s makes $9245 per hour”.

Piette and Arrison recorded the overwhelmingly negative reaction to a planned Center City arena, the latest in a series of proposed projects that would disrupt the Chinatown neighborhood. Arrison’s We Are Not Your Colony (2025) conveys community anger through a soaked protester leading a rainy march. His t-shirt reads, “No Arena/Stadium/Casino in Chinatown”. Piette shows the project also angered Philadelphia’s LGBTQ community, which built a dais of cardboard boxes at City Hall proclaiming, “76 Place: Bad for the Gayborhood Bad for Philly,” and “The Philly LGBTQ+ Community Says NO ARENA!”

Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing have been a focus for Finkle, who’s covered numerous actions by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and Project HOME. Project HOME -- Open Your Eyes (c 2004) depicts blindfolded protesters with a sign saying “I don’t see any housing for me”.

The photographer’s commentary

Beyond the subject being depicted, a photograph’s composition injects subtle commentary. The angle chosen, an iconic face, a perfectly phrased placard, and even the title can all make an image more impactful.

Two Arrison images demonstrate this: at the 2018 Women’s March, a Black woman with the sign, “I am a nasty woman. Get use to it!” And at a 2025 No Kings march, three tired women of a certain age sit on a wall wearing paper crowns. Arrison called it No Kings, Only Queens.

A prescription for democracy

The display moves viewers toward Singh’s interactive installation Threads of Resistance (2026), which enables digital exploration of protests in Philadelphia since 2020. Even the technically obtuse can appreciate how causes intersect and overlap, represented by a constellation of colorful clouds. Want to get granular? A tutorial explains how.

Singh, a filmmaker and computer scientist, designed the piece to reveal links among communities. Having previously worked in artificial intelligence and run a YouTube channel for recording and archiving live music, Singh now produces short films and uses his platform to elevate marginalized movements.

Created by TILT in partnership with activist and author Christopher R. Rogers, the exhibition springs from a 2022 book, How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising, edited by Rogers and Fajr Muhammad with the Paul Robeson House and Museum. The show validates the time-tested prescription for preserving democracy, the one our founders wisely endorsed: speak freely.

At top: Mike Arrison’s 2025 photograph of a No Arena in Chinatown protest, ‘We Are Not Your Colony’. (Photo by Mike Arrison, courtesy of TILT.)

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