“In his Instagram post, Encina thanked Gomez, the Getty photographer, whose presence on the train he said was “quietly reassuring.” In the interview, he said seeing a photographer there gave him some comfort because someone was documenting what was happening.”
“Gomez” is Finn Gomez, and “Encina” is Roswell Encina, “a gay Filipino American civic leader”, and president and CEO of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, who was on the Washington, D.C. Metro underground/overground on the Fourth of July, en route to a Fourth of July party among friends in Maryland, when the Metro carriage filled with uniformed, masked and sunglass-wearing members of the “white supremacist group Patriot Front”. Hundreds boarded the train.
You may have seen photographs of a single black woman sitting alone, surrounded by standing masked and uniformed white supremacist men; or of another black man standing by one of the doors surrounded by masked and uniformed white supremacist men. They certainly were circulating on Blue Sky where I picked up the link to the article. Encina said it was terrifying; he was glad the two others remained anonymous and were not being hounded, but decided to “speak out because he could”. He had a platform.
What drew me to the article was the quote given by a Blue Sky poster, which opens this blog entry, and which ends: “seeing a photographer there gave him some comfort because someone was documenting what was happening.”
It gave me an insight into something I think my mind had been skirting, about the Archive and Study Centre in its oral history, its gathering of archives and museum objects, and its engagement with and documentation of the present. A name, really; an understanding.
I wonder if you can transpose with me that idea of “comfort”; the comfort “because someone was documenting”, documenting “what was happening”, into a world of the terrors and distresses of being human in the different realms the Archive was serving. The comfort of an archivist, coming from an institution meant to be forever by definition, recording someone in the process of dying while picking up archives and books as they are explaining them and their meaning; or photographing in the situ of a closed-down therapeutic community, and then bringing away and bringing to former residents and members of staff memory boards, bulletin boards, objects and art-works, otherwise abandoned and heading for a skip; or recording members of a therapeutic community from which children have been traumatically removed, in the midst of their invisibility and the slide into invisibility of all the love, and meaning and care they had given, while also picking up archives; or designing a project in which former children from therapeutic communities, animated by the belief that other children, today, need what they had when they were children, and telling their stories and taking part in events to share their stories as their documentation of what is possible, and essential.
It might not work. But for me it was immediate: an immediacy of feeling in which Roswell Encina’s observation sprang out and seized recognitions; that at least, whatever happens - and he didn’t know in the midst of it what the motives were or what the outcomes would be - the documentation would remain. That “someone” was concerned and documenting.
The article, with photographs:
“Man in viral D.C. Metro photo says he was ‘terrified’ as masked white nationalists surrounded him”, by Christopher Wiggins, Advocate (website), July 6, 2026
https://www.advocate.com/news/people/roswell-encina-patriot-front-metro
