Carlos Javier Ortiz

Day Without an Immigrant March. Chicago 2006

Carlos Javier Ortiz (b.1977, Puerto Rico) attended Columbia College where he studied photojournalism. Carlos was a staff photographer for “Chicago In The Year 2000”, a year long project documenting the city and its inhabitants. He worked for several years as a photojournalist for newspapers in Philadelphia and New Jersey and is currently working on a cross-cultural youth violence project, which documents adolescents in Chicago and Guatemala. Carlos was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography in 2008 and recently received the 2009 domestic photography award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights for the Too Young To Die project. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Washington Post, Time Magazine, NPR, The Guardian, Stern Magazine and other publications.

About the Photograph:

“The photo is of a man at an immigration rights rally in Chicago. I was drawn to him because he was dressed as the Statue of Liberty and therefore was dressed as a woman. I was also interested in him because he represented an American icon in a sea of people who were fighting for their rights as Americans. There was something about the image of a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty juxtaposed with people engaged in such an important fight that really captured me. An estimated 400,000 protesters took to the streets of Chicago almost four years ago to show their support for the eleven million illegal immigrants living in the United States.”