The images’ work in activist and political efforts is founded on their constitution as discursive places of photography. The picture inherits the political character of the space of protest and aides the visual activism of the Movement for Black Lives. Imagine holding a freshly developed Polaroid picture of the protests in your hand. Say, it depicts a scene comparable to Lam’s image of the burning street (seefigure 1), or something of the like. Since it is a Polaroid – the image of which has just materialized – it is safe to assume that you are present in the protest, now seeing two versions of the scene in front of you: one in real life, the fire’s heat still perceptible on your skin; the other one as the material image in your hand. The taking of the photograph has turned the scene into an object, whose significance, depiction, and political potential is open for debate. Given the camera’s work and the photographer’s eye, it is likely that you discern details in the image that you were not aware of in the scene itself. In the photograph of the man in front of the flames, for example, you might now identify the wooden structure he is sitting on as a transport pallet, the reflective surface leaning on this structure as a metal sheet, when your gaze was caught on the man’s expression beforehand. Depending on what the image shows, the original setting might have already changed, rendering the photograph a real-time document of a specific moment in time. The image is a material, haptic, and localized rendition of the events that compiles the things happening in front of you onto its surface. In its affective depiction of the scene, the space of protest is rendered tangible in relation to other positions and images.
Within the photograph, the significance of individual elements might shift. The meaning of an object you had seen before might become apparent or insignificant. You might, for instance, reexamine the connection between the two written statements in Lam’s image – “kill cops” and “Black Lives Matter” – as more or less important than imagined, as revealing more or less of the movement’s background than anticipated. Not least, the picture has become something you can take away from the protests, show to others, and use as a discussion starter to engage in conversations about the matter of Black lives, the legitimacy of protests, or the frames of recognition addressed in the movement’s photographs and protests. It transports the political scene to different locations of debate, changing both the representation of the protests and the political fields of appearance and recognition. In its political constitution, the image becomes an agent of protest.
I have chosen to start the second chapter with this odd imaginary Polaroid to contemplate the theoretical position of photographs in protests. In a sense, (be)holding this image becomes a political act that discloses our own position as well as the political dimensions of the photograph’s visual aesthetic presentation. Something has changed in the discursive constitution of the scene the moment the image has been taken. The metaphorical Polaroid, at this very moment, simultaneously presents us with both the scene on the street and its photographic rendition. It reveals the difference in the two locations, transposing the discursivespace of the street, whose political composition is established in the “space of appearance” as well as in the performative dimensions of protest (Arendt; Butler, resp.), into the discursiveplace of the photograph that, like the visual activism addressed later, operates in changing the sensible distribution of the perceptible, read as a supposedly common experienced and perceived order of things (Rancière). The representation of th
