Synopses & Reviews
Photography and Social Movements is the first thorough study of photography's interrelationship with social movements. Focusing on the photographic production and dissemination during the student and worker uprising in Paris in May 1968, the Zapatista rebellion, and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa in 2001, the book argues that at times of political uprisings, photographic documentations, often contradictory, strive to prevail in the public domain, extending the political or economic struggle to a representational level.Photography plays a central role in this representational conflict, by either reproducing or challenging stereotypical narratives of protest. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary analysis of a wide range of practices, amateur and professional, and of previously unpublished archival material will add considerably to students', researchers' and scholars' knowledge of both the visual imagery of political movements and the developing history of photographic representation.
Synopsis
Now available for the first time in paperback, Photography and social movements is the first thorough study of photography's interrelationship with social movements. Focusing on photographic production and dissemination during the student and worker uprising in Paris in May 1968, the Zapatista rebellion, and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa in 2001, the book argues that at times of political uprisings, photographic documentations, often contradictory, strive to prevail in the public domain, extending the political or economic struggle to a representational level. Photography plays a central role in this representational conflict, by either reproducing or challenging stereotypical narratives of protest. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary analysis of a wide range of practices - amateur and professional - and of previously unpublished archival material will add considerably to students', researchers' and scholars' knowledge of both the visual imagery of political movements and the developing history of photographic representation.
Synopsis
This is the fist book to examine the previously unstudied interrelation of photography and social movements, focusing on a series of three case studies, namely the student and worker uprising of May 1968 in Paris, the Zapatista indigenous movement in Mexico (since 1994), and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa (2001). The study is groundbreaking in providing an interdisciplinary analysis of photographs of social movements, drawing upon original archival research and a wide range of photographic practices, both amateur and professional. The book explores how photographs of social movements function in a complex ideological web of transmission of political ideas and how their meaning relates to the way these photographs have been used. It follows the circulation of these photographs within various contexts, such as the communication institutions that served the movements - including magazines, newspapers and the Internet - the mainstream press, and subsequent photographic publications and displays. The book argues that these often contradictory photographic representations, strive to prevail in the public domain, extending the political or economic struggle to a representational level. This representational conflict is central to the book, which examines how photography contributes to the visibility and sustainability of these struggles and how it either challenges or reinforces stereotypical dominant narratives of activism and protest.
Synopsis
The first thorough study of photography's interrelationship with social movements
About the Author
Antigoni Memou is Lecturer in Art History at the University of East London, UK.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I
1. Toute La Presse est Toxique: May 1968 in the Mainstream French Press
2. The Zapatistas and the Media Spectacle
3. 'When it bleeds, it leads': Death and Press Photography in the Anti-capitalist Protests in Genoa 2001
PART II
4. The Student Movement of May 1968: Activist Photography, Self-reflection and Antinomies
5. Zapatistas, Photography and the Internet or Winning the Game of Visibility
6. Carnival Against Capitalism: Global Days of Action and Photographs of Resistance
PART III
7. May '68 in the Museum
8. The End of Silence: Antonio Turok's Photographs of the Zapatistas
9. Joel Sternfeld's Anti-photojournalistic Images of Genoa
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index