Bachman said that he knew he had a picture that would speak volumes about what was going on, and that just moments before, he had been facing in the opposite direction and only turned around when he heard someone shout to Evans to warn her that she was going to get herself arrested.
[a] Teju Cole, writing in the New York Times Magazine, names Bachman's photograph among a group of images of "unacknowledged everyday black heroes" connected to the Black Lives Matter movement, such as those of a man throwing a tear gas canister during a protest in Ferguson, Missouri after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown; Bree Newsome taking down a Confederate flag at the South Carolina State House; and activist DeRay Mckesson being arrested in Baton Rouge, also while protesting Sterling's death.
[5] The photograph has drawn comparisons to images of previous civil rights demonstrations, such as that of Turkish activist Ceyda Sungur being tear-gassed at a 2013 protest in Istanbul, and Flower Power, a photograph of a young man putting a flower into a National Guardsman's gun barrel during a 1967 anti-war demonstration,[7] as well as the image of "Tank Man" taken during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
[15]Evans was interviewed by Gayle King for CBS This Morning,[16] and the public radio program Studio 360 later commissioned Tracy K. Smith to write a poem on the subject of the image.
[2] Bachman's photograph of Evans standing as the two police officers charge towards her was awarded first prize for Contemporary Issues in the 2017 (60th) World Press Photo Contest.