Photography and social movements: politics of visibility in contemporary scene

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the problem of politics of visibility as a set of interventions organized by social movements in order to build visibility for their political and cultural projects. To this end, an approach that was promoted at different times sought to develop research ranging from the establishment of an arrangement as the theoretical and methodological analysis of the images produced by social movements in question. In thosefirst moments we made a foray into the midst of the contemporary debate about social movements in order to situate it as a phenomenon that takes place in a field of mediatized determinations, where the prevailing hegemony of a visual sensibility. So that the second time it became necessary to understand the space where you build the determinations of this hegemony from the construction of a theory of the photographic image. This theory required tounder stand the problem of visibility by understanding the technical image asa political game that both governs the actions of social movements and is permanently displaced by them. So the rules are defined in a discursive level,according to the contingency of power relations that work through the conflicts established. For social movements such relationships are intended to ensure the dispute policy of the senses through the visibility of their protest and fightfor the definition of the possibilities of interpretation. Thus, the third time theres earch efforts turned to build an array whose methodological tools toanalyze the speech of the images in order to identify under the surface of the photographs the power relations that are built from the struggle waged between movements social and their antagonists. Finally, at the last moment were analyzed images from four different experiences of social movements: the images of the Paris Commune, the environmental organization Greenpeace,the feminist group Femen, the Gay Pride. Each one was analyzed as differentforms of political activity of the visibility so that the approach of the practices carried out by these experiments allow recognizing the discursive arrangements that make up the possibilities of making visible, through amodel of representation against hegemonic designs of the movements socialscene in the midst of contemporary politics.