Ask just about anyone and they’ll tell you, Portland, Oregon is perhaps best known for being a sustainability-minded, pedestrian city with an abundance of great coffee, craft beer, good food and live music, plus fine art and crafts, and people who seem to value both individuality and community. In some ways, it still is.

Yet things changed or, at least shifted, in late spring 2020. Perhaps you had to be there. While most might disagree, preferring to be as far and away as possible from the energy, the anger, and the violence of the night, anyone who really wanted to understand “Portland’s Summer of Rage” or, in the case of Rian Dundon, to photograph it, really had to be there.  And he was.

Although born in Portland, documentary photographer Rian Dundon was raised in Pacific Grove, where his family remains and his uncle is a postal carrier. Yet in 2019, Dundon, who has been photographing “the rise of extreme politics” on the West Coast since 2016, returned to Portland, his home just a few blocks from the protests that ignited after the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd.

Floyd was neither the first nor the last Black person to fall prey to police brutality. Yet, accompanied by other events in rapid succession, his was the incident that escalated a social movement already underway.

Dundon, whose Fujifilm XF10 camera was a subtle intrusion on the night, was close enough to photograph the fear, the rage, the intensity, and the theater of folks dressing up and acting out about incidents that had surpassed injustice to the point of righteous indignation.

In the months that intervened between the Floyd murder and the 2020 presidential election, and continuing well into 2021, says Dundon, social justice protests erupted on a nightly basis. Such uprisings are inherently more menacing under the cover of darkness.

“At the time, I was working on assignments for Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic,” said Dundon, “but when something like these protests are happening, you don’t sit around and wait for an assignment. You go. It was intense, but I wasn’t really scared. When I get into that kind of situation, I’m pretty good at focusing on what needs to be done.”

For 100 nights, Dundon witnessed the demonstrations, capturing the portraiture of protest with a tool as unobtrusive as a point-and-shoot camera. Still, he recorded events amid the sting of pepper spray, the explosion of a gas canister, and the haze of tear gas. The result is “Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage,” a visual portrayal of a season in Portland’s history which changed the landscape and the tenor of the city.

Dundon’s images, up close and angry, include toppled statues of political leaders once honored, now avenged; throngs of protesters in silhouette, bowing their heads to tear gas beneath a smoke-filled sky; fists held high in protest or portrayed in fresh tattoos, plus “Proud Boys” ink, identifying the neo-fascist militant group that promotes political violence; and gas masks, worn by both protesters and police.

Dundon’s book is a commentary, primarily through photography, paired with a foreword by journalist Donnell Alexander, an introduction by historian Carmen P. Thomson, and Dundon’s own message, all of which lend a sociopolitical context to the Portland protests.

Dundon was thrust into this project, having previously photographed political rallies in the San Francisco Bay Area, after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Having witnessed a lot of political conflict in Berkeley and Oakland through the lens of his camera, he went on to capture the partisan conflict arising on a regular basis between the left and the right during Portland rallies.

“Then COVID happened, and things quieted down,” he said. “But when the George Floyd protests erupted at the end of May, I realized that documenting this was the continuation of a project I had been working on, in looking at the state of politics and protests in Portland.”

Portrait of a photographer

Dundon, 42, became interested in photography as a boy, while growing up in Pacific Grove. His mother was an amateur photographer, he says, which meant inspiration, guidance, and cameras were always available. In the 1990s, engaged by the culture as well as the ride of a skateboard, he started taking pictures of his friends skateboarding in Pacific Grove, emulating the style of photography he admired in skater magazines.

“Pretty soon,” he said, “I found myself more interested in the people than the sports element of skateboarding. Already looking at journalistic photography, studying magazines like National Geographic, I became interested in documentary photography.”

Dundon went to New York University, where he studied photography on a journalistic track, and graduated with a BFA in liberal arts.

“Becoming a photographer is a lot more circuitous than deciding to be one and finding people who hire you to take pictures,” he said. “It’s more of a calling than a job, like being an author. In the last 20 years, I’ve held many different types of jobs, including working as a photo editor and a teacher, which I continue to do while working on documentary photography.”

Dundon, who previously taught photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, will soon start teaching at Clark College, a junior college in Vancouver, Washington.

“Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage,” which was published in June, is actually Dundon’s third book. His first two books, produced while living in China for six years in the 2000s, include “Changsha,” which portrays life in the city of Changsha in central China. His second, “Fan,” offers a collection of photos he made while working as an English tutor to one of China’s most celebrated actresses, Fan Bingbing, paired with a commentary on what it was like to witness her rarified existence.

“My new book is a visual record of historical events which changed Portland,” said Dundon, “but it’s also a commentary on how protest is enacted in the 21st Century, in the context of cell phones and social media, and the way this has changed the motivations and visual nature of protests.”

“Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage” is available via Oregon State University Press and Amazon.