"Moving Pictures: What’s Really Radical About the Eric Garner Protests"

"It seems that the textbook images of American protest, whether from Montgomery, Kent State or the Summer of Love, inspire an intense, yet distancing, nostalgia in those of us who did not live through those years. We feel jealous that we were not young when they were young. How could we, in 2014, ever be as impassioned, as militant as they were in those black-and-white photos of the Freedom Summer?

By those standards, the cellphone photos from this month’s protests will be compositional failures, not only poorly framed but also badly lit and mostly featuring the backs of heads. Millions of them, however, will be published across the Internet, and while most will be either ignored or halfheartedly favorited, the sheer number of images has formed an aesthetic unto itself. The photographer who shot the climate-change march in black and white made beautiful, revelatory images that captured the essence of the march, with the assumption being that the event will have passed once the images are published; that the work will be the capstone to a historic event. The cellphone images from the Eric Garner protests demand no such reflection: There is never a lesson to be learned. Instead, they function like text messages sent by an impatient friend: I am here. Why are you not?...

Carrying a sign and chanting helps, but it exists in only one sphere, unless you take a picture of it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/magazine/moving-pictures.html

mmmmm. In the protests marches I have been part of, there has always been a moment when I looked to the friends I was with just after one of us took a picture and we sort of rhetorically ask 'Is this the right thing to be doing? Am I in the moment right now or am I doing this for my newsfeed?'. And it's like THE social-media-millennial question. And it feels really important to be documenting and broadcasting and it seems like there aren't really words and I feel like I'm not the person to be delivering the words for those moments, that the communication is the people and the being there and the feeling and the need for recognition that is experienced not on an individual level but on a group level. And, like, what do you do with that?

There is something about visibility here, in all caps.

Related (sort of in the continuum): Why we don't post about Baltimore one

FB: A short and helpful reflection on protest selfies; I would love to hear if anyone has thoughts/reactions