Enacting Conflict With a Camera: Image Activism and the Production of Unruly Bodies in the Syrian Uprising

• In Event: Digital Media and the Body

Abstract

This paper considers the new and complex ways in which digital (mobile) cameras and contentious political action are being fused in the context of the Syrian uprising. I contend that we cannot understand the shaping role of digital cameras in political life and how they now contribute to struggles against injustice unless we take into account not only how the end product (the image and its reception) but also how the locally rooted, embodied and performative practices of creating and distributing images contribute to the very making of a conflict. This is also to suggest that we need to go beyond a realist understanding of video as a means for producing visible evidence and attend also to political image production as a personified enactment of justice. Activist not only use cameras to speak to truth to power, but also to realize themselves as political subjects and negotiate exactly what such a subjectivity may be and can do. Ethnographic contextualizations of activist image practices - in the former Yugoslavia (Rasza 2013), for instance, and in Mexico (Hinegardner 2009) – show that for these activists, picking up a camera is a direct form of political action and a way to transform themselves from subjected bodies into empowered political agents. Similarly, in the context of the Arab uprisings, to participate in collaborative practices of media making can be conceived of as a critical mode for protesters and activists to not only publicize but to enact resistance, to exert their agency and their civic and human rights. In this view, the laborious, deeply committed, coordinated and often precarious efforts of Syrian activists to create images and make them move comprise a field of political organisation and action in its own right – a field that provides ample opportunities and encouragment to take on, maintain and negotiate one’s oppositional subjectivity toward a repressive order.

Author

• Kari Anden-Papadopoulos, Stockholm U