Portraits of the 99%

"Portraits of the 99%" is an ongoing photo project by San Francisco based portrait photographer Robert Schultze.

When the protests in San Francisco CA started, Robert Schultze saw an opportunity to photograph a variety of passionate people in a diverse city. He took 64 portraits on white and didn't think a thing of it. On October 9th the next day, after placing them on his blog he discovered his blog and his website had crashed overnight due to overwhelming amounts of traffic. His inbox had been flooded with messages from people all over the country telling him how beautiful and inspiring the photos were, and that he should come to their city and do the same.

It was then that he realized this project was much larger than what he had initially thought.

He started making contact with people involved in the Occupy protests around the Bay area and traveled around via Caltrain and BART, simply fulfilling his desire to take more photographs of this movement. By the time he went to his third location, he knew he had something special on his hands. He began contacting major publications such as Rolling Stone, Time Magazine and the New York times. He set up an IndieGoGo fund so that he could continue the project.

On November 19th the San Francisco Chronicle published 10 of the portraits and wrote a brief article on him and the project. That publication sent numerous donations to his fund and has enabled him to leave the Bay Area and continue the project around the country.

Since then he has taken over 300 portraits all over California with plans to travel the country in December and January. His goal is to put a human face to the movement, show that the people who are involved are really just the every day ordinary citizens standing up for what is right.

His goal is have the photos published in as many magazines, newspapers, websites and blogs as possible. He is also approaching art galleries in hopes of displaying the images in respectable, accessible spaces.