Interview with Sandra Barrilaro. “Photography is a fundamental tool for activism” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Activist Photography and Its Usage in Women's Movements: Guerrilla Girls and FEMEN
Archiv Orientalni: Journal of African and Asian Studies, 2019
This article examines the role of photography in the organization and actualization of social movements, and how it has depended on technological developments. The study reveals the transformation of activist movements, which began as gangsterism, from the early days until today and discusses the shifting of methods to the digital environment with the support of technological developments. The human communities that pour out into the streets to awaken the masses, can now let millions hear their voices within a single photo frame. In this context, as a branch of activist movements, photographs of the two most visible women's organizations (Guerrilla Girls and FEMEN) are analyzed. The use of the photograph by non-governmental organizations-and whether the organization's objectives are concordant with the visual content-are discussed.
The Beach, the Sea, the Fence: Spain's Necro-Frontier and Humanitarian Photography
Photography and Culture, 2024
The maritime border separating Europe from Africa has become the backdrop for a photojournalism that bears witness to the suffering and death of thousands of migrants since the early 1980s. The beach, the sea, and the fence are the specific sites where such a humanitarian crisis has been photographed. Taking the work of some of those committed photographers as its object of study and drawing mainly from the writings of Susan Sontag, Ariella Azoulay, and Emmanuel Levinas, this essay evaluates the possibility of studying photographic images of the humanitarian crisis at the so-called gates of Europe to reframe established theories of the relation between spectatorship, ethics, and otherness.
Reading Camera Lucida in Gaza: Ronit Matalon's Photographic Travels
Comparative Literature
Following the 1988 translation of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida into Hebrew, Ronit Matalon, an Israeli writer of Egyptian extraction, began interpolating Barthes into her writing, in part through unacknowledged quotations. This essay explores how Camera Lucida “traveled,” as a piece of both visual theory and personal reflection, to the Israel of the first Intifada and its aftermath. Drawing on Matalon's use of Barthes, the essay seeks to highlight Camera Lucida's theoretical tensions and to show how these tensions were productive for an experimental mode of critical writing. In her short fiction, Matalon uses the elevated Hebrew of Barthes in translation as a surreal device of linguistic and narrative estrangement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from the predictable script of an Israeli journalist's visit to a mourning family in Gaza. Parodying Barthes's discovery of the famous “Winter Garden” image of his deceased mother, Matalon questions Camera Lucida's relevance and significance for situations of mourning in which inequality prevails and the deceased subject does not function as the Barthesian unique and irreplaceable other. Reading Matalon's novel The One Facing Us (1995), I contend that here, in the fictionalized framework of neocolonial Cameroon, the author addresses the racial implications of Barthes's idea of photographic “contingency,” anticipating American criticism of his work by more than a decade. Matalon treats the light captured in the photograph itself as a means of disrupting photography's contingency and introducing indeterminacy into the black/white order of Africa, as well as the racial orders of Israel and Palestine.
Chronica Mundi, 2018
This essay puts side by side the life and work of two female photographers who were part of two different generations of the so-called worker photography movement during the 1920s and 1930s. Tina Modotti and Kati Horna have similarities in their biographies. They were both born in Europe and endured immigration, at some point they chose to live and work as photographers in Mexico, and both used their photography with political intentions. This essay intends to focus on those similarities as well as on the differences in their photographic work by analysing two images of mothers breastfeeding their children, one took by Modotti in Mexico in 1927 and the other took by Horna in Spain during 1937. Although they were made only ten years apart, those two photographs show affiliations to two different generations of politically committed photography and we believe that both images and the conditions under which they were made are able to speak about the between-wars avant-garde visual cultures to which they are connected. In this way, by following both photographers’ and their images’ travels we are able to follow the visual interchanges that later would help to shape the mid-century humanist photography.
I.B.Tauris eBooks, 2023
The Palestinian national liberation movement - or the Palestinian revolution as it is known in Arabic - emerged during the 1960s as an iconic cause of the global Left. This volume highlights the different practices of international solidarity that characterised this period, and how they shaped and were shaped by the global trajectory of the Palestinian movement. Bringing together scholars with versatile linguistic and interdisciplinary skills, Palestine in the World puts the Palestinian movement into conversation with the models of transnational politics that emerged through the revolutionary period. From participation in a vibrant sphere of intellectual and cultural production, the work of travelling revolutionaries as delegates, volunteers, and militants, and the connected mobilisations that took place in different corners of the world, international solidarity with and from the Palestinian movement was integral to its ascendance on the global stage. By treating the Palestinian revolution as a world phenomenon - with cases from Cuba, France, the US, the GDR, Japan and more - this volume reveals the forms of solidarity that shaped the rise of the movement and their afterlives today. It illuminates the rich connected histories of international solidarity that positioned the Palestinian movement as an iconic anticolonial struggle.
Inauditas: Tracing the Sound of Migrant Memories in Venezuelan Women Photographers
2023
Catalogue for a special exhibition on migrant photography and photography of migration, focusing specifically on Venezuelan migration from 2016 to 2022. The exhibition brings together the artwork of seven Venezuelan migrant women artists and interviews in which they share their own experiences of migration. The common thread of the exhibition is the challenge that each of these works poses to a notion of photography that reduces it to the ‘visual’, while disorganizing a traditional notion of the ‘audible’ that takes away its ‘auratic’ effects, thus reinforcing the experience of photo- graphy as one of listening.