Activist Memes + Reading

 

Bodily autonomy is the foundation for gender equality and overall a fundamental right. This is the right to make decisions over one's own life and future.  

Excerpt from On Photography

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.


This quote felt really powerful to me. It highlights the simplicity of photographs and how important that is. Movies and television are more interesting, considering it’s a series of moving images, but photographs are just as powerful. One still could tell so many stories while a movie might take multiple frames to. I connected collecting the world through photographs to memories. Everyone sees things differently through their own gaze and having your own photo of a memory makes it unique to you especially.



Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations.


I didn’t know that they were started in Paris by the police. It makes sense though considering film was also started in France by the Lumiere brothers. While being a keeps cape for memories, photographs are also a way to get justice as they are the undeniable proof.



Art of Activism

Most people would not define themselves as activists either. Yet, in a sense we all do forms of activism every day; organizing a group of people to go to a movie or picking a restaurant; lobbying parents for extra screen-time or your boss for a raise; talking a friend out of a bad relationship.

This quote feels reassuring. In the previous paragraph it talks about how all people are artists, as we are all creative though I love how activism was written down to consider the things people do in their day to day. Maybe they can’t go to protests, but they can sign an online form and send it around. Every person is an activist because it really is having an idea of what needs to be changed, and actually doing something about it.



…artistic activism is not the preserve of the privileged. Artistic expression and cultural creativity flourish among communities who are marginalized within formal spheres of politics, law, and education. We’ve also learned that artistic activism works particularly well in repressive regimes where overt political protest is prohibited, yet artistic practices are tolerated or even celebrated.

It’s about making a point, making a stand and making people uncomfortable. Activism (and artistic activism) isn’t always going to be pretty, it can’t always be pretty. It’s to make people uncomfortable enough to join the cause and want to enact change so they’re comfortable again, though this time everyone feels that way.