Cindy Trinh: Activists of New York City
by Nadya Okamoto
Activists of New York City is a “documentary photo project about activism, protests, and social justice movements in New York City.” The blog Activists of NY has over 25,000 followers across Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook. The female mastermind behind the blog, Cindy Trinh, has an interesting trajectory that led her to where she is now, and her passion for photography is authentically beautiful.
WHAT IS “ACTIVISTS OF NEW YORK CITY” TO YOU?
It is a documentation on what is happening in the streets of New York, as the events happen. As you see what is happening in the news and we see the response to these tragic events happening, I wanted to document what activists are doing in response to these events. So, for example, the recent news of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castille, it really sparked a lot of outreach and a lot of emotions, and what you saw in the streets in response to the news was nothing short of dramatic and controversial and intense, and that is what I aim to do with my project is to document what we are seeing happening today. Just a month ago with the Orlando shooting there was a really powerful vigil at the Stonewall Inn that was just made a historical landmark by President Obama. The response we saw from that event was very powerful and beautiful and that is what I wanted to do with the project is to really show how people are coming out with support or for certain causes important to our country and document how people are responding to these issues. It really is — for people to see my photos years down the line and see this as a point in history. So many people have gone through and maybe down the line and we can look back and learn from our lessons, what it took to get to where we are at. Like when we look at photos from civil rights movement and we have to realize what people had to go through during that time for us to enjoy what we do today. but we are still fighting. We are still working towards equality and justice, so it’s almost a continuation of a record. I think of myself as a documentarian, and someone who is contributing to the record of our history, and what is happening to our country and we can look back and learn from our mistakes and think about what it took to get to where we are today.
The community in New York is very active and very powerful. They are organizing, and I feel like New York really knows how to get people behind a cause and to organize in a way that is effective and sends a message out to the world. I feel like I have an obligation to show what these people are doing and to show what organizers are doing in the streets.
WHAT IS YOUR BACKGROUND AS A NEW YORKER?
I’ve been here for 8 years. I’m originally from Southern California, Orange County, and I moved out here in 2008. I moved initially for school, and I just stayed out here. I’m actually a lawyer as well, so I went to Syracuse Law School in upstate New York. I briefly practiced law for a year or two, but I realized that my true passion was photography, so I’ve been pursuing photography for the last couple years now and making it my full-time career. I’m currently transitioning, I was an in-house counsel for a book publisher for a year and I realized I didn’t like law at all. I didn’t enjoy it and I felt like I wasn’t impacting my community enough, and I really hated the a culture and the politics of law, so I always wanted to become a photographer, I just never realized I had the skills and capabilities to do it. I never knew I was capable of doing it until I started this blog. It has given me a ton of exposure and I’ve been published in a bunch of different papers and news sites and getting different jobs from different organizations and they contact me to do photography for them. It’s very progressive organizations doing great work, so from there, like wow, this is what I really want to do with my life. So I quit my law job and I’ve been freelancing ever since. Times get tough, sometimes I still pick up work here and there. This is where my passion and future lies. I just constantly work hard and get myself out there, I truly believe that things will work out for me in the end. I’ve got a couple gallery shows coming up, so I’m really excited for where my future is headed.
HOW WERE YOU INTRODUCED TO PHOTOGRAPHY?
Back in college, I actually did photography, and I always knew I wanted to become photographer back then, but you know that society and family pushed me. I’m Vietnamese-American, so for my mother, an immigrant, pursuing a creative field was very risky. So, that is why I ended up going to law school. It didn’t work out for me because the economy was so terrible and i didn’t find a job that i liked. A few years ago, I was really depressed and I didn’t know what to do with my career anymore. I started thinking, when was the last time I did something that made me really happy, and it was back in college, so I started this blog. it really started out as something that I wanted to do for my personal happiness, so I could do something that I felt happy about and it turned into something more than that. It was something way more than I had anticipated, the popularity of the blog keeps growing and growing. All the work I have done is because of how the blog has done, it has given me that exposure. I’ve gone through so many hurdles in my career, I thought I was going to be a lawyer to complete doing a 180 and pursuing photography now full-time. It’s a huge risk and it’s scary thinking about it sometimes because I left my cushy office job to do freelance, but it is something I really care about and something that makes me happy and in the end I think happiness is more important than money which is why I did this and pursue this and do freelance, which is really hard because it makes me happier and to me that is what is most important in this world. I really really enjoy it, if I were to give advice to anyone out there, young, female , or male, it would be really pursue what you want in life and do what makes you happy. I know it sounds cliche but I feel like if you put the time into it and you love it enough and you dedicate yourself then all of that will come after, it will fall into place which is what I truly believe. so, if you do the right thing and you work hard, it will show and people will see that and other people will see how much you care about it and eventually everything else will come into play. I feel like I’m doing something I actually care about that can impact other people that aren’t me, it’s for a wider community.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO FOCUS ON ACTIVISTS IN NEW YORK?
Even before I started the blog, I’ve always been engaged in activism in my community. Back in 2011 and 2012 when I was still practicing law, I did a lot of work during the occupy wall street movement. I represented defendants pro-bono, and that really got me into activism. And when I got into legal serving during the occupy movement, I saw with my own eyes what was happening and I felt that the media was always portraying activists and protesters as terrible people like they didn’t have jobs and were all delinquents. but that wasn’t true because from what I saw these were all peaceful people. Extremely educated. A lot of them have jobs, they have masters, PHDs…and I really disliked how media portrays activists and protesters, as if they were all violent. Almost everyone I’ve ever met, they protest peacefully. My idea was to show the peaceful side of things. Even today, all we see are the clashes between the police and the protesters, which is definitely important to show as well, but really my blog highlights very personal portraits of the protesters and showing the diversity of the people who are there: black, brown, yellow, white, old, white, young, queer, gay, lesbian — the diversity of the people who are out in the streets and it shows them in a very different way than what we see in the mainstream media. I like to show people emotional and raw but the emotions too, in a way that mainstream media has failed to show the truth. So, that is why I created the blog in the first place and to educate the public that there are protesters out there that are not at all what you think that they are. I’ve always been an activist and something that I’ve always cared about in our country and our world right now so ANY was basically my creation because of my history of activism already. I chose to document activists because I’ve always been an activist and I’ve always cared about these things and to me it’s important to show this positive side of what people are doing in their communities and how they are fighting for justice and equality so that is why I chose to really highlight activists. I think my blog is very very different from Humans of NY. With the popularity of HNY a lot of different blogs and different sites played on the name, and so yeah, when I decided to name the blog, it felt right just highlighting the people on the streets, but what I do is very different. And with Humans of NYC, Brandon personally said in his interview with Katie Couric, he tries to stay away from politics (besides open letter to Donald Trump), and with me, that’s what I dive right into. I choose to cover certain things that I care about. So a lot of the content is really on par with my own voice and my own thoughts about what is happening in this world.
WHAT IS THE MOST EMOTIONALLY MOVING MOMENT YOU HAVE CAPTURED?
Wow. There are so many moments, there’s a lot, but one that really resonates with me was a year ago after the Charleston massacre in North Carolina. After the guy killed 9 people in the church in North Carolina there were a series of very powerful vigils that happened in new york, and there was one that happened right after the shooting where a lot of people that gathered in Brooklyn (where I live) and I just broke down in tears as well because a group of people, maybe around 20, in the large crowd, just broke down in tears because they couldn’t contain themselves. With most protests, there are tears, but for some reason, this was very very very emotional because this small group within the large crowd they were all standing in a circle holding hands and at the same time they couldn’t contain themselves and they were just crying and just fell to the ground and at the time, I had covered a lot of black lives matter rallies and I had seen a lot of emotion in the air. And yet, for some reason, this particular moment after that Charleston massacre, it really hit, it was so dramatic, that group of people just falling to the ground and crying, it was very dramatic and very emotional. Normally when I am out there I try to remain the documenter, basically documenting what is happening, but that night I felt so compelled to join in and join. So that was a hard moment, that was really really hard and there are many other moments like that. And just recently after the Orlando shooting very similar moments of just tears and heartache and suffering and you really feel it around the people you are with. When you are in a crowd of people who are also suffering, you really feel that. but this is why I choose to do what I am doing. Images are so powerful, images can change the world, and can change people’s perspectives and change people’s views and I hope to continue to do that with my blog — to show people images of what is happening and for them to be affected personally by them, and that is my ultimate goal.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE IMAGE OF YOURS?
An image I took very early on in my blog may be the one I’m most proud of. It is the reason why I have as many followers as I do on my blog. It has been reblogged and liked I think, 600 thousand times. It was the image that really propelled my blog forward and gave me the followers that I have today and it is an image of a young black girl with a sign, and with a sign that basically had a description “this is not about one man, this is about a system built on slavery. A system that has always been rigged against black people in America.” So that Image is really powerful to me because it signals the beginning of my blog and where I started and how it became as big as it is now and it gave me my followers and that exposure and since then a lot more of my images have gone viral and have been shared and been shared by celebrities. Since then a lot of my other images have been shared as well. But that really gained the momentum and made what it is today, so that is probably the image that I think about a lot only because what it did for my photography career, it’s not my favorite image of all time I think there is a handful of images that I really love and captures what I want but it is also artistically the quality that I hold myself to. That’s probably the one image I would highlight if I had to highlight one.
