Visual Politics
Antigoni Memou, Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001)
Manchester University Press, 176pp, £65.00, ISBN 9780719087424
reviewed by Tom Snow
Antigoni Memou’s Photography and Social Movements is published at a crucial moment for thinking the relationship between image production and protest activity. The book focuses on three main events: the general strikes in Paris during May 1968; the Zapatistas uprisings and subsequent declaration of independence in Chiapas Mexico since 1994; and the protests in response the 27th G8 summit in Genoa Italy in 2001. As Memou recalls, Genoa 2001 prefaced a long decade of diverse political uprisings across the globe over the course of the early 21st century. Probably most prominent in the minds of the contemporary reader are the Arab uprising (‘Arab Spring’) beginning in 2010 that saw the ousting of several dictators across the Middle East, and the anti-neoliberal globalisation alliance across the USA, Europe and many other parts of the world during 2011 identified collectively under the name Occupy. The latter movements are not the focus of this volume - however an impressive breadth of research into public archives, extended through more recent online image-databases, provides a useful historiography through which to discuss photography’s previously under-researched role in activism and the politics of representation.
A real strength of the study is the author’s treatment of photography’s materialism as political space. That is, a study that largely downplays the intentionality of the photojournalist, artist, or activist, and instead invests in the representative qualities, or relative autonomy, of the photograph itself. Likewise, the tendency for historians to consider images merely as illustrations to literature is avoided. Of course the photograph, like any other document, is not impermeable to manipulation or de-contextualisation. Through engagement with methodologies that treat photography variously as an index or trace, a two-dimensional analogy to three-dimensional space, photography is considered dialectically, or, as Walter Benjamin famously alluded, history broken down into images rather than into a complete story.
It is the second section of the book that undertakes the most difficult task. Here Memou tackles the ‘counter-production’ of material by activists in response to the mainstream media. For example, and in-dialogue with the first section, the image of Subcomandente Marcos (the alter ego of an otherwise anonymous Zapatista) is discussed as a tactic to combat the media’s need to promote a particular figure as leader of a movement. The masked Marcos - an identity that was, incidentally, renounced in 2014 - is considered alongside other images of the Zapatistas that stage multiple figures with covered faces. Memou reads this as an attempt to portray a political a non-hierarchy, a method of organisation that rejects social distinctions based on gender and class, and which reflects the political ethos in Chiapas.
Another example includes the production of student publications during May ’68. Newspapers such as Action, Borricades, and L’Avant Garde Jeunesse are rightly viewed with a critical distance. Whilst publicising violent police actions worked as a counter to state owned media, the tendency for students to problematically align themselves with workers during the general strike is read through visual elements of the publications. One image, reproduced in the book, shows young protesters marching out of the Renault factory behind a raised flag proudly printed on the front of Action no. 3. Yet, and as Memou points out, many union members referred to the students as bourgeois, in their view betraying Marx’s and Engels’ recommendation that any meaningful worker emancipation should come from within the working classes rather than being the product of a privileged education system. In fact, the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) actively tried to prevent student demos in the Renault factory, revealing a disjunction inherent to the movement otherwise remembered as a frictionless union of a dissident populace. And whilst recent activist theory may suggest that separate protest movements should seek alliance with one another in order to bring about revolution within the sphere of political economy - for instance Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s ‘multitude’ - it is the maintained focus here on historical and geopolitical contexts that proves most effective in the analysis of specific historical moments.
Though lucid and concise, Memou’s unconventional structure can on occasion leave some important theoretical questions unaddressed. One example is the way images of masked Zapatistas appearing in military attire could be complicated further by comparison to armoured police during Genoa 2001. How is anonymity problematised on the one hand by a mediatised suspicion of the unidentifiable (from the stateless refugee, to the hooded youth or masked tyrant, to certain religious dress codes), whilst legitimised on the other during state-backed brutality of the police forces clad in armour? In particular I’m thinking of recent examples including the removal of ID numbers from the uniforms of police during the Istanbul Gezi Park demonstrations of 2013 in response to activists recording and identifying police violence with smart phones, something that was also reported to have happened during Occupy Wall Street. In a volume of this length questions about more recent movements could understandably act as a distraction and risk falling into the common trap of asking how activism proceeds from here, which is not the point of this study. However there does seem to be room to subject the interlinked chapters a more conceptually oriented excursus. If the public sphere is the commonly contested site with regard to the dissemination of images, then in what ways can the uncertainties of the discursive public sphere be recognised and discussed in relation to each example? How might that inform the theoretical limits of thinking activism directed towards the state in the given examples of 1968 and 1994, and then more explicitly towards privatisation and the obscene inequalities of the free market in 2001?
That Antigoni Memou’s study generates questions alongside those it attempts to address is testament to the urgency of her project. Photography and Social Movements is a significant contribution to a complex discourse that aims to deal with contrasting accounts of events that continue to influence multiple sites of cultural and intellectual production. Its breadth of research and perceptive conclusions will surely inform many reflections on the visual culture of contemporary activism to come. This book is about photography and the recent past, but is also an account of the way visual literacy can inform our picture of history that otherwise - to paraphrase Benjamin once more - flits by in an instant.
A real strength of the study is the author’s treatment of photography’s materialism as political space. That is, a study that largely downplays the intentionality of the photojournalist, artist, or activist, and instead invests in the representative qualities, or relative autonomy, of the photograph itself. Likewise, the tendency for historians to consider images merely as illustrations to literature is avoided. Of course the photograph, like any other document, is not impermeable to manipulation or de-contextualisation. Through engagement with methodologies that treat photography variously as an index or trace, a two-dimensional analogy to three-dimensional space, photography is considered dialectically, or, as Walter Benjamin famously alluded, history broken down into images rather than into a complete story.
It is the second section of the book that undertakes the most difficult task. Here Memou tackles the ‘counter-production’ of material by activists in response to the mainstream media. For example, and in-dialogue with the first section, the image of Subcomandente Marcos (the alter ego of an otherwise anonymous Zapatista) is discussed as a tactic to combat the media’s need to promote a particular figure as leader of a movement. The masked Marcos - an identity that was, incidentally, renounced in 2014 - is considered alongside other images of the Zapatistas that stage multiple figures with covered faces. Memou reads this as an attempt to portray a political a non-hierarchy, a method of organisation that rejects social distinctions based on gender and class, and which reflects the political ethos in Chiapas.
Another example includes the production of student publications during May ’68. Newspapers such as Action, Borricades, and L’Avant Garde Jeunesse are rightly viewed with a critical distance. Whilst publicising violent police actions worked as a counter to state owned media, the tendency for students to problematically align themselves with workers during the general strike is read through visual elements of the publications. One image, reproduced in the book, shows young protesters marching out of the Renault factory behind a raised flag proudly printed on the front of Action no. 3. Yet, and as Memou points out, many union members referred to the students as bourgeois, in their view betraying Marx’s and Engels’ recommendation that any meaningful worker emancipation should come from within the working classes rather than being the product of a privileged education system. In fact, the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) actively tried to prevent student demos in the Renault factory, revealing a disjunction inherent to the movement otherwise remembered as a frictionless union of a dissident populace. And whilst recent activist theory may suggest that separate protest movements should seek alliance with one another in order to bring about revolution within the sphere of political economy - for instance Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s ‘multitude’ - it is the maintained focus here on historical and geopolitical contexts that proves most effective in the analysis of specific historical moments.
Though lucid and concise, Memou’s unconventional structure can on occasion leave some important theoretical questions unaddressed. One example is the way images of masked Zapatistas appearing in military attire could be complicated further by comparison to armoured police during Genoa 2001. How is anonymity problematised on the one hand by a mediatised suspicion of the unidentifiable (from the stateless refugee, to the hooded youth or masked tyrant, to certain religious dress codes), whilst legitimised on the other during state-backed brutality of the police forces clad in armour? In particular I’m thinking of recent examples including the removal of ID numbers from the uniforms of police during the Istanbul Gezi Park demonstrations of 2013 in response to activists recording and identifying police violence with smart phones, something that was also reported to have happened during Occupy Wall Street. In a volume of this length questions about more recent movements could understandably act as a distraction and risk falling into the common trap of asking how activism proceeds from here, which is not the point of this study. However there does seem to be room to subject the interlinked chapters a more conceptually oriented excursus. If the public sphere is the commonly contested site with regard to the dissemination of images, then in what ways can the uncertainties of the discursive public sphere be recognised and discussed in relation to each example? How might that inform the theoretical limits of thinking activism directed towards the state in the given examples of 1968 and 1994, and then more explicitly towards privatisation and the obscene inequalities of the free market in 2001?
That Antigoni Memou’s study generates questions alongside those it attempts to address is testament to the urgency of her project. Photography and Social Movements is a significant contribution to a complex discourse that aims to deal with contrasting accounts of events that continue to influence multiple sites of cultural and intellectual production. Its breadth of research and perceptive conclusions will surely inform many reflections on the visual culture of contemporary activism to come. This book is about photography and the recent past, but is also an account of the way visual literacy can inform our picture of history that otherwise - to paraphrase Benjamin once more - flits by in an instant.