Visual Protest, Viral Images, and Virtual Participation: Protest and Photography in the Contemporary Movement for Black Lives

This interdisciplinary study sees press photographs of the BLM Movement in the US as agents for Black liberation. Close reading both the images and theoretical considerations on Blackness, photography, and the often intangible articulations of racism in today’s society, the book focuses on the work the photographs do for the movement, as they politically garner attention and create discursive places, historically unsettle seemingly fixed narratives about the African American past, and virtually establish room for digital activist debate. Based on Azoulay’s ＂event of photography＂ and Rancière’s ＂politics of aesthetics,＂ it builds the theory of an attentive reading of photography and addresses the larger frameworks of photography as event in anti-racist considerations. In their political-aesthetic and performative dimensions, these photographs negotiate the current matter of Black lives in the United States and articulate ontological dimensions of Blackness as political struggle and affirmative position. They become mobile and material discursive places that lift the protested debates into wider fields of consideration and visibility, complicating notions of society, politics, and interaction.

Nicole A. Schneider, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany.