Photography and Social Movements

Download or read book Photography and Social Movements written by Antigoni Memou and published by . This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 theanti-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 communicationinstitutions 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 thepolitical 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 ofactivism and protest.