John Boal Photography

Today I had the “opportunity” to photograph a picketing by the Westboro Baptist Church at my alma mater, Woodbridge Senior High School. If you don’t know who they are, they are perhaps the most controversial example of free speech in this country at the moment. The Westboro Baptist Church has embarked on a crusade to let everyone know that “God Hates Fags”. In fact, they believe that all the deaths from AIDS, 9/11 and the wars that followed are because of our implicit acceptance of homosexuality. God is apparently punishing us. They’ve become quite infamous for their strategy of picketing funerals of AIDS victims, soldiers and Marines. I won’t go into the logic of their argument, but suffice it to say, they certainly get a reaction out of many people. So about a half dozen church members picketed across from the high school and about 200 people responded to protest their presence, or message. As a photographer, I would have liked for them all to be within 5 feet of each other, but of c...

Yesterday was a long-ass day. Not only because of election day, just partly. I started off in Richmond at about 430am. This was completely unrelated to editorial content. Sometimes freelancing gives you interesting opportunities to shoot other things (translation: there is often good money in it). Like I said, I started off in Richmond at 430am. Actually, it's more like I started off driving to Richmond Monday night at about 530pm, got to my friend's house near richmond by 8, watched a little football (my fantasy football team is still undefeated, thank you), hit the rack and was up bright and early the next morning. I shot some coffee tasting (a guerilla marketing set-up on the sidewalks of Richmond) run by a marketing group, done for a large company that happens to sell coffee, among other things, and by 930am was back on the road to NoVA. I fiddled with the pictures minimally at home, and was off to Manassas for some election day photos. Filed those for the next day's pa...