Photography and Social Movements ― From the Globalisation of the Movement to the Movement Against Globalisation

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.

Antigoni Memou is Lecturer in Art History at the University of East London