Photographers Mark Seawell, Tom Szalay and Chris Miller at Faces of Dissent at the Union Studio in Ogden.

It’s a precarious time in America to protest, to speak freely. Whether cancellation, the lawsuit or jail, serious forces are arrayed against the citizen who chooses to walk down the street, fist raised. Into this atmosphere, three Ogden photographers have been pointing their cameras at dissent in public spaces and for a one weekend show at the Union Studio in Ogden, Mark Seawell, Chris Miller and Tom Szalay will lay those images bare.

There is a temptation to believe that we are living through something entirely unprecedented. And some of what we are living now certainly is. But American politics have always had cycles in which the street becomes the primary civic venue. The difference now may simply be that social media fragments the record, and shortens our memory, so we forget what a physical crowd actually looks like. This exhibition insists on reminding us. It emphasizes the physical, the texture of democracy as it literally touches pavement.

The show’s exhibit statement describes a moment of widespread “fears of political disruption, violations of Constitutional rights, corruption of institutions, and threats to the very rule of law” as the country struggles through 2025. It refers to “authoritarian rule,” surveillance, ICE and federal tactical units occupying American cities, and to new pressure on women, minorities, LGBTQ+ and trans communities. All three artists have photographed public demonstrations and political crowds in Utah—from 2020 through 2025—and all three say that photographing dissent has taken on a new urgency as national politics become more unstable.

Mark Seawell, “Freedom”

Mark Seawell has been at this arc since 2020, when George Floyd’s murder cracked the national shell and protest became the circulating bloodstream again. He shoots in Utah, but the implication is national. He’s been patient. He doesn’t go for fireworks. He goes for the unglamorous, real, psychologically truthful moment, the one moment a single person’s face betrays sorrow, or resolve, or moral exhaustion. His photos are an American lament, in the genre of the street.

Chris Miller’s work is the most digital-native of the three. Not in the disposable-phone way, but in the deep-post-processing manner. His strategy is to merge dozens of protest frames into single panoramic, wide, almost algorithmic event densities. He uses Lightroom and Photoshop to create a composite that allows us to see protest as a complex system. And that choice is philosophical. In a time when the right to assemble is itself rhetorically being criminalized, Miller is reminding us: dissent is not a single body, it is a system of bodies, it is a network.

Chris Miller, “Banner of Dissent #3”

Tom Szalay’s work is direct, conceptual, confrontational. He lists the chaos out loud in his statement—the executive orders, the yo-yo tariffs, the firings, the entire Project 2025 governance-through-chaos aesthetic—and then he makes images that hold that chaos in metaphor, collage, and allegory. Some of his new pieces explicitly remix older photographs from his newspaper life—combining past with present like a warning: we have been here before. But also: this time is worse. There is a sense in Szalay’s work that the American myth machine is not just broken—it is being actively weaponized.

Here are three different visual grammars, with one identical diagnosis: the country is in a constitutional stress test. And there is another implicit thesis in this show: that photography itself is becoming one of the last democratic tools remaining—the camera as constitutional proof-of-life.

 Tom Szalay, “Evangelist”

FACES OF DISSENT, Union Studio, Ogden, Nov 6 (4:30–7:30pm), Nov 7 (5–9pm), Nov 8 (12–5pm)

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.