Photographic Activism, Civil Testimony -

Photographic Activism, Civil Testimony, and Collaborative Visual Politics under the Banner of Digital Connectivity

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony
by
Susanne Holschbach, translated into English by Alexandra Cox. (Extracts) University of Vienna Berlin University of the Arts media history theory of photography, contemporary art and mediality, gender and visual culture

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony Collaborative Visual Politics

From: Amateur Photography: From Bauhaus to Instagram.

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony
Accidental journalism
Photographic Activism Civil Testimony Colla

With the advent of digital photography culture, a new amateur protagonist enters the scene: the citizen journalist. Initially, the term signifies no more than that every person who carries a cellphone has the potential to become a press photographer, namely when she/he witnesses a newsworthy event, takes shots of it, and presents these shots for subsequent publication. The media scientist Stuart Allan speaks of “accidental journalism” in this connection.[i] The term citizen journalist appears with this ‘slapdash’ meaning in association with the tsunami disaster in South-East Asia in December 2004, for example, and with the bomb attacks in London of July 2005. In order to get hold of material on these events by any means possible, editorial teams, television stations, and news agencies reached out to people concerned and invited them to send in their films and photos. And so it happened that, for the first time, cellphone movies by tourists were shown on television, and cellphone photos by London Underground passengers even made it onto the front pages of daily newspapers.[ii] This valorization of amateur material was thereby itself turned into a media event that triggered heated debates. Professional photographers feared the accrual of competition that threatened not only to jeopardize their professional status economically, but also to undermine photojournalism’s qualitative and ethical standards. Others, in turn, saw precisely in the viewpoint of those concerned an enrichment, and even a necessary reorientation of press coverage.[iii]Photographic Activism Civil Testimony

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony
Connective witnessing

Indisputably, the universal availability of recording technology and the possibility to disseminate self-produced content via social media has entailed lasting changes to the fabric of media witnessing, therefore the “witnessing performed in, by, and through the media”.[iv] Prior to digital citizen journalism we had, on the one hand, the journalists as privileged eyewitnesses, and on the other, we had the spectators, and between them there were the traditional media—newspaper editors, television broadcasters, press agencies—as the gatekeepers. Now, when eyewitnesses do the filming themselves and post their material on platforms, and viewers add and share their own comments on it, they themselves become mediators. The term “connective witnessing” has established itself in English-speaking media science for this new configuration of media-based firsthand experience.[v] Under the terms of connectivity, witnessing becomes a participatory and self-reflexive act, able to open up a variety of perspectives on an event across the multitude of scattered witnesses.
Photographic Activism Civil Testimony Collaborative Visual Politics
The phenomenon of connective witnessing first entered the consciousness of a wider public during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The demonstrations and protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo were photographed by countless participants, posted on blogs, and uploaded onto photography platforms such as Flickr. It is still possible to access profiles from the Flickr groups on the Egyptian Revolution today and follow the demonstrations of January 28, 2011 from the personal perspective of various participants.[vi] In the accompanying feeds, alongside the eyewitness accounts of participation in this collective occurrence we find events from the photographers’ private lives, the birth of a child, for instance, or even everyday situations such as meet-ups with friends. According to media scientist Louise Merzeau, these blogs can be comprehended as examples of a “proactive memory”, which sets against “the world view of globalization the resistance and self-containment of a world of its own”.[vii]

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony
Sousveillance—Surveillance ‘from below’

The Egyptian Revolution is equally an example of how participating observers can be turned into citizen journalists in a pronounced sense: If independent reporting on the part of the state is prevented, or if the intention is to manufacture a counter-public, media witnessing can become the conscious choice and even a self-elected obligation, pursued even at the risk of losing of one’s own life.

[…] […]
In the context of military or police violence against civilians, the raised arm holding a cellphone becomes a gesture of resistance: I am showing that I am being filmed or photographed. If many people do it, it becomes more difficult to remain unjustly invisible. This form of testimony, that is to say, of a media-based documentation from the perspective of an inferior position, is described as “sousveillance”: Taking on the form of monitoring or observation from below, in a sense it inverts surveillance, which is monitoring by the state or otherwise privileged institutions.

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony

[…] […]

Gestures of protest

Demonstrations have been photographed by participants in other political contexts too, for example by Karl Sauer, a union-affiliated amateur photographer who accompanied numerous actions in the 1970s and 1980s, or by Nuri Muslouglu, a photography activist of Turkish origin who took photographs at demonstrations by migrant workers.[viii] (Fig. ## #) These and other photos constitute a specific iconography of protest which is valid to this day: on the one hand, the look at a section of the demonstration procession, depicting the participants as a collective whose cohesion is manifested by their jointly held banners in particular; on the other, the close-ups of small groups or individual persons, portrayed along with their protest signs.

This image type is picked up by a digital demonstration practice, the “selfie protest”. This is how Kerstin Schankweiler describes a form of political proclamation first enabled by the advent of digital connectivity.[ix] The protagonists of this form of protest portray themselves with a message that is attributed to a certain movement via a hashtag. The demonstration procession is thereby relocated from the street to the virtual realm of the Internet. An early example was the Tumblrblog We are the 99 percent, which was set up in 2011 in the course of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Each of the photos assembled there shows a person holding a handwritten poster or note, declaring membership of the “99 percent” through a description of the personal situation (debt, unemployment, sickness, and the like). The image as a whole conveys a political statement, while the written message obtains authorization and authentication through the self-portrait. In combination with the gesture of writing, the gesture of the selfie represents a ‘phatic’ utterance, aimed at making contact. It demands gestural imitation and, when it works, causes a motif to become a meme, that is to say, an image type that goes viral on Internet platforms as users produce new variants over and over. The viral nature of protest selfies depends, not least, upon the laws of the digital attention economy: Many hashtag movements have had celebrity multipliers—the movement #BringBackOurGirls by Michelle Obama, for instance—, while others, such as #BlackLivesMatter, are kept going by a close linking of political protests on the street with digital activism.

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony

[…] […]

Collaborative visual politics

As the Black Lives Matter movement progressed, one of its offshoots was the Twitter hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, which was a reaction to reporting on the fatal shooting of the unarmed student Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014. Prompted by a private portrait of the youth disseminated in the media, in which Brown assumes the mannerisms of a stereotypical black gang-member, Tyler Atkins, the hashtag’s initiator, asked himself which portrait the press would have likely used had he himself been the victim of police violence: the one that shows him wearing a suit and holding a saxophone, or the one in which he can be seen wearing a sloppy t-shirt and a bandana? Within days, thousands of juxtapositions of a ‘negative/vigilante’ with a ‘respectable’ portrait, mostly depicting the protagonists in graduation robes or professional wear, were shared via Tweeter.[x] The target of the corresponding meme, used by the contributors to comment on the at least latently racist portrayal of young Afro-Americans in the mainstream press, can be identified as the politics of representation of minorities and marginalized groups. Contributors’ central concern is to oppose their portrayal by the prevailing gaze with their own pictures, and in doing so to alter social perception as a whole.

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony

[…] […]

Collaborative visual politics in this sense has become more tangible due to connectivity, which has extended the democratic promise of photography as a tool for everyone into the realm of public effectiveness. However, keeping in mind the civil contract of photography, as postulated by Ariella Azoulay,[xi] there is also the associated fact that, more than before, we bear responsibility for how this tool is deployed: responsibility for the end to which we post which photos to which platforms; for whether and to where we pass on others’ photos; for what keywords we use to describe or comment on them. And finally, this includes the responsibility to query the parameters within which these acts of visual politics take place: the parameters of social media and their economic, technological, and social agendas.

Susanne Holschbach is an art and media researcher. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Vienna, the Berlin University of the Arts, and elsewhere. She researches the media history and theory of photography, contemporary art and mediality, and gender and visual culture.

Photographic Activism Civil Testimony

[i] Stuart Allan, Citizen Witnessing. Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis (London: Polity Press 2013).

[ii] See ibid., 92; Fred Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (New York: Aperture, 2013), 272

[iii] See Vincent Lavoie, “War and the iPhone. New Fronts for Photojournalism”, in: Études photographique, no. 29, 2012, 1; https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio/294627902_War_and_the_iPhone_New_fronts_for_photojournalism.

[iv] See Paul Frosh und Amit Pinsheivski, “Introduction. Why media witnessing, Why now?”, in: Media Witnessing. Testimony in the Age of Mass Communcation (London / New York: Palgrave Malcmillan, 2009), 1-18, here 1.

[v] Mette Mortensen, “Connective witnessing: Reconfiguring the Relationship between the Individual and the Collective”, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 18, no. 11, 2015, 1339–1406.

[vi] Many of the groups can still be found on Flickr, see e.g. “egypt revolution 2011”: www.flickr.com/groups/1581219@N25/ (accessed July 24,2019).

[vii] Louise Merzeau, “Digitale Fotografie. Für einen digitalen Gedächtnisraum”, Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturforschung, no. 1, 2010, 63–75, here 66.
Photographic Activism Civil Testimony
[viii] About Video as Evidence, witness.org: https//vae.witness.org/about/about-video-as-evidence/ (accessed July 23, 2019)

[ix] Kerstin Schankweiler, “Selfie-Proteste. Affektzeugenschaft und Bildökonomien in den Social Media”, SFB 1171, Affective Societies – Working Paper 05/1; https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/fub188/18775/Schankweiler_SelfieProteste_workingpaper.pdf.

[x] See for instance Violetta Simon, “Was, wenn er Anzug getragen hätte”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 13, 2014; https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/iftheygunnedmedown-zu-michael-brown-guter-junge-boeser-junge-1.2088275 [accessed July 23, 2019].

[xi] Ariella Azouy, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

Click on the poppy for extracts from the essay by Ulrike Bergermann: