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Throughout its brief history, photography has had a close relationship to social movements. From the Commune of Paris in 1871, the first political uprising to be captured by camera, to the 1990s anti-globalisation movement, the photographic medium has played a crucial role in political struggles. The book reflects critically on the theory of photography and the social movements themselves. It draws on a range of humanities disciplines, including photography theory and history, social movement theory, political theory, cultural history, visual culture, media studies and the history and theory of art. The book takes as a starting point 1968 - a year that witnessed an explosion of social movements worldwide and has been interpreted as a turning point for political practice and theory. The finishing point is 2001 - a signpost for international politics due to September 11 and a significant year for the movement because of the large-scale anti-capitalist protests in Genoa. Within these chronological limits, the book focuses on a selection of distinctive instances in which the photographic medium intersects with the political struggle. The three case studies are not the only pertinent examples, by any means, but they are important ones, not only historically and politically, but also iconographically. They are the student and worker uprising in France in May 1968 and two moments of the contemporary anti-capitalist movement, the indigenous Zapatista movement in Mexico and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa in 2001.
’s presence is never neutral. Its occurrence is never passive. When imperial expansion or its preliminaries were at stake, the camera transformed into an agent of subjection. It is a tool which participated in, and supported, the application of violence. Three main issues arise when examining photographs taken in the context of European expansionism. First, photography became an instrument of colonial infiltration not because it documented wars, police operations, or displays of force, but rather because it was the
The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.
, RADI-AID, Africa for Norway , www.radiaid.com (accessed 23 January 2021 ). St-Pierre , E. ( n.d. ) Photography 101 Guide: Develop an Eye for Great Photos ( Ottawa, Uniterra – A WUSC and CECI Program ). Document shared by Stephanie Leclair . UNICEF, Guidelines for Journalists Reporting on Children , www.unicef.org/eca/media/ethical-guidelines (accessed 8 January 2021 ). World University Service of Canada (WUSC) / Entraide universitaire mondiale du Canada (EUMC) ( n.d. ), Communications Guide
the block. Once this happens, the still-extant drawing begins to be perceived as an ‘original’, and wood engraving begins to be understood as a reproduction technology (as opposed to being a distinct, collaborative form). This chapter explores distinct aspects of the increasing closeness between wood engraving and photography, and considers how the two emerging media affected each
4 Ectoplasm and photography: mediumistic performances for camera Neil Matheson Why this dark cabinet? The medium declares it is necessary to the production of the phenomena ‘that relate to the condensation of fluids’. (Camille Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, 1907) A major preoccupation of the astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion in his late work of the 1920s was the idea of the independent existence of the soul, the special powers with which such an entity might be endowed, and its capacity to survive the destruction of the body. This idea of the
In Pakubuwono X's photograph, the halo belongs not to a male, Muslim Javanese but to a foreign monarch, a Christian and a woman, all of which makes it an unusual image in the history of Javanese photography. This image eloquently captures how photography, a visual medium with global reach in the early twentieth century, drew upon Javanese visual practices in dialogue with European conventions. In this photograph we also encounter the major theme of this book: how the relations of a European, female king with her subjects were mediated through
6 Witnessing e-waste through participatory photography in Ghana Peter C. Little Introduction Drawing on extended ethnographic research in Agbogbloshie, an urban scrapyard in Accra, Ghana that has become the subject of a contentious electronic waste (e-waste) narrative, this chapter explores the extent to which citizen1 photography and similar participatory visual research efforts augment contemporary toxic studies in general and e-waste studies in particular. Attuned to the visual promises, politics, and possibilities of photography in toxic landscapes
5 Zapatistas, photography and the internet or winning the game of visibility T h e EZLN movement has placed great importance on visual imagery for their struggle, with direct references to easily recognisable portraits of Zapata and Che Guevara in an attempt to re-appropriate them from mainstream discourse. Photographs can also be weapons, to paraphrase Marcos, in the struggle for social justice and equality, as illustrated by Marcos’s self-conscious construction of an image for the media spectacle, discussed in part I. Marcos seems to be fully aware of this
There are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding – at a distance, through the medium of photography – other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others The subtitle of historian