13. Picturing the Political: Embodied Visuality of Protest Imagery

This chapter seeks to theorize an embodied visuality that brings about political acts of change and may help define when an image enables social change and political engagement. The chapter distinguishes between the political currency of iconicity as it is developed and analyzed by Hariman and Lucaites (No Caption Needed. Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, University of Chicago Press, 2007) and that of spaces of appearance as understood by Mirzoeff (2017a). The former is based on the premise that iconic photojournalism supports the liberal democratic society by being the glue that keeps democracy together. The latter is defined as “a photograph of the space of appearance that emanates from the space of appearance, contains its potential and is not simply about it (as in the form of photojournalism)” (Mirzoeff, 2017a, p. 40). Analyzing two visual representations of the Black Lives Matter movement, the chapter argues that despite the similarity in what and who is depicted, the two distinct modalities of protest images create different political responses.