Photography and Protest in Israel/Palestine : The Activestills Online Archive

Abstract

This chapter will explore two key ways that photography plays a role within the aesthetics of protest. This will be done through a discussion of a small number of photographs of political demonstrations selected from the online archive of the Israel/Palestine-based photographic collective Activestills. The photographs discussed in the first section of the chapter present evidence of people carrying photographic images within demonstrations. While the second section deals with examples of the how photography has been used to document the immediate scene of protest for distant spectators. After these discussions of particular examples from the archive, the chapter concludes with a more speculative discussion of the Activestills archive itself.