Joel Sternfeld's anti-photojournalistic images of Genoa
Joel Sternfeld’s Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa is a series of twenty-seven formal portraits, which form the basic body of a book, published on the occasion of an exhibition of Sternfeld’s project at the White Box Gallery in New York. The photographs were taken during the anti-globalisation protests in Genoa in 2001, and document the diversity of participants in the transnational movement against neoliberal globalisation. The movement, which took to the streets in Seattle, Prague, Porto Alegre, Quebec, and Genoa and is known by various names such as “anti-corporate movement,” “anti-capitalist movement,” “global justice or fair trade movement,” and “a movement for a globalisation of rights,” was far from homogenous: it brought together people from across the globe, who shared different ideological and cultural backgrounds and often had diverse understandings of its processes, alternative visions, strategies, and tactics. Workers and their unions, small farmers and their organisations, consumers, environmentalists, students, women, the unemployed, Indigenous people or religious believers—just to name the most important—challenged decisions taken by global meetings such as those of the G7, G8, World Bank, and the World Economic Forum.
Sternfeld documented the protests in Genoa and produced a body of work which focused on the resistance to the limits of globalisation, as manifested on the streets of Genoa in 2001. This chapter examines Sternfeld’s photobook, highlighting the interrelationship between the visual and the textual in the book. It studies Sternfeld’s strategy in relation to contemporary photographic projects that privilege straightforward pose and strict composition of portraits and questions the relationship of the project with earlier documentary and photojournalistic practices.
Revisiting or breaking with past practices?
The main body of the book consists of portraits of participants, activists who travelled to Genoa to protest against the policies of the eight richest countries of the world. Each photograph, on the right page, usually depicts one participant per picture. The subjects, centrally placed in the photographs, look straight at the camera, and therefore the photographer and the viewer. Their posing in front of the camera shows not only their awareness of the camera’s presence, but most importantly self-representation. Although there is a deliberate emphasis on the diverse characteristics of age, gender, and ethnicity among the subjects, young people take up a big part of the book .
The activists’ reported statements, on the left page of the portrait, vary from statement to statement—from describing feelings and intentions to long explanatory texts arguing against capitalism, economic inequalities, and exploitation of the poor countries and ecological destruction. The statements record the participants’ beliefs and incentives to travel to Genoa, indicating the movement’s diversity. Nevertheless, what most of them share is an emotional response, at times strong, to the injustices of the capitalist system. The underlying emphasis on the right causes of the protest is not only evident in the texts, but also in the introductory passage chosen by Sternfeld. The quoted text, taken from Henry the Fourth by William Shakespeare, reads:
O gentlemen! the time of life is short;To spend that shortness basely were too long,If life did ride upon a dial’s point,Still ending at the arrival of an hour.And if we live, we live to tread on kings;If die, brave death, when princes die with us!Now, for our consciences, the arms are fair,When the intent of bearing them is just.
The principle of justice is omnipresent not only in the book’s title, taken from the passage above, but also throughout the book.
The first portrait of the series shows a young woman dressed in a red T-shirt and wearing a sticker on her top that reads: “no to violence, no to debt, drop debt.” The participant poses against the neutral background of the sky and leaves us with little choice but to focus on her facial expression—sad, perhaps even frustrated. Her statement on the left page gives the reason for her activism, while her disappointment is also reflected in her words:
I’m concerned about the world. I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but it seems like everything is falling to pieces. This is the first march I’ve ever joined, but I came because I felt it was important to come.
In another portrait, a young man in a T-shirt with a declaration against the embargo imposed on Cuba stares at the camera angrily. His statement, short but strong, reads: “Rage. Three billion people feel rage.” The protester poses within the demonstration, as one can tell from the other people visible in the background.
One of the strongest photographs of the series depicts a man who poses next to a poster of the campaign against the ecological disaster of Bhopal. The US multinational company’s leak of toxic gas killed thousands of residents of the Indian city, Bhopal, in 1984. The hideous picture of the burial of a dead baby became a recognisable symbol of the catastrophe and the following campaign. The man in Sternfeld’s picture is photographed next to the campaign posters bearing that photograph. Although the man is not centrally placed in Sternfeld’s photograph and his body is directed towards the posters, his gaze is directed back to the camera. The title of the poster, “The real face of globalisation,” reads as a strong response to the cruelty of the photograph. The statement on the opposite page raises issues relevant not only to Bhopal but globally, such as ecological catastrophe, human devastation, lack of justice, and corporate irresponsibility. This is only one of the cases where smaller causes and organisations find shelter in the wider movement. While this man is dedicated to a specific cause, other participants’ motivations appear looser. In another photograph, the young boy in the black top, staring at the camera in a rather enigmatic way, does not look angry. Instead, his gaze reveals a youthful brightness. He travelled all the way to Genoa to protest against exploitation, injustice, and insufficient democratic government. But, as he humorously admits, he also travelled there for the lasagne.
The integration of text and image is extended through the two long essays written by Alexander Stille and Stefania Galante. In fact, the book opens with the essay written by Stille, a journalist and author. His essay, entitled Violence at Genoa – A “Question of Detail?”, is a detailed account of the events in Genoa focusing primarily on the issue of violence. The text also provides important information about the preparation of Genoa for the summit and the police raid on the Diaz School. A personal account of the events at Diaz, written by Galante—a doctoral student in historical studies and sociology and one of the activists who spent the night at Diaz School during the police raid—gives details about the violent police, the torture, and the imprisonment of many demonstrators, and is published at the end of the book.
The collaboration of Sternfeld with Stille and Galante and the inclusion of quotations next to the photographs is a mode that has been revisited many times throughout the twentieth-century history of photography. More precisely, the format of the book directly refers to a long documentary tradition resembling, in particular, the 1930s American documentary photobooks. Indicative examples of the close collaboration between a photographer and a writer are An American Exodus(1939), a very successful photobook of the period which was the result of the collaboration of the photographer Dorothea Lange and sociologist Paul Schuster Taylor, and You Have Seen Their Faces, initially published in 1937, which inaugurated the collaboration of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White and her husband Erskine Caldwell in the role of the creative writer. In both cases, the essays contextualised the photographs and formed the interpretive background. The combination of visual and textual information also takes place on a more direct level, that of direct juxtaposition of photographs and captions or small texts. Lange and Taylor decided to caption the photographs with statements by the migrating farmers. Next to the photographs appeared “what people said, not what we think might be unspoken thoughts.” On the other hand, Caldwell and Bourke-White gave their own captions to the photographs of sharecroppers, quoting “people saying things they never said.” The underpinning idea of framing the photographs with an analysis and documentation of the beliefs of the people photographed remains very similar. Many of these American documentary photobooks achieved high popularity and commercial success, and nowadays are considered classical representations of 1930s America. Treading on Kings shares with them some characteristics, such as the close combination of textual and visual documentation, the adaptation of this format as a result of the successful collaboration of a photographer and a writer, and the highly explicit political content.
Nevertheless, criticism of the 1930s documentary projects focused on the subjects being presented as mute victims and the imposition of the photographer's ideas on them; the class inequalities between the photographers and their subjects and even further between the subjects and their audiences; the transformation of the subjects depicted into objects of knowledge; the lack of any objective content in these projects; the interpretation of these documentary projects as expressions of liberal consensus according to which poverty is shown as a result of natural disasters and misfortune rather than as a result of the intrinsic character of the predominant economic and social system. Or, as Martha Rosler put it in one of the most influential critiques of documentary photography: "poverty and oppression are almost invariably equated with misfortunes caused by natural disasters: casualty is vague, blame is not assigned, fate cannot be overcome."
Rosler's critique—among others that surfaced during the 1980s, including Allan Sekula’s, John Tagg’s, and Victor Burgin’s (to name only the most prominent)—targeted the ideological claims for documentary photography’s neutrality and revealed its structural limitations to disrupt the ideological constraints imposed by the social democratic version of state corporatism in the period of the New Deal in the United States.
Despite Sternfeld’s obvious and likely deliberate reference to this tradition, much of this criticism could not be applied to his project, which lacks the power relations ascribed to these early documentary projects. In fact, most of the subjects are not strongly differentiated from the photographer or their likely viewers. Sternfeld, as well as the potential viewers of these photographs, are middle-class Western citizens, as are a majority of the participants in these demonstrations. Given the high cost of travelling to Genoa for non-European citizens, a quite large number of the demonstrators are Westerners. This is not to argue against the multiculturalism and class diversity of the anti-capitalist demonstrations, in which people from different social, cultural, and economic backgrounds participate, but to state that the power relations inscribed in the 1930s documentary projects cannot apply to Sternfeld’s project.
Bourke-White dramatised her subjects, photographing farmers from low camera angles, taking close-ups of her subjects, juxtaposing them with the sky and not their agricultural environment. In contrast, the way that the subjects pose for Sternfeld—their direct gaze into the camera—shows a relationship of equality between the photographer and the photographed. There is a strong sense throughout the project that there is an emphasis on the personalities of the participants, evident in their personal statements published in the book. This is justified by the decision of the photographer not to portray any big groups or mass demonstrations. This decision seems to be at odds with journalism’s obsession with the masses and the violent subject, and the official political perception of the demonstrations as an amorphous mass.
There is a break, too, with another long tradition, that of street photography, which has its roots in the first half of the twentieth century. Street photography’s fragmented and dispersed history became associated with such diverse practices as those by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank, to name a few of the most influential photographers of the genre. Street photographers took as their subject the life of the street and attempted to capture its instantaneity, motion, its details and peculiarities. Many times, they have been characterised as “innocent bystanders,” witnesses to an event almost by chance. For this reason, contemporary theorists have criticised the genre for “loss of specificity or scrupulousness,” which lacked the “desire to change social realities,” and the practitioners for being devoid of any “sense of the social” and, therefore, being transformed into mere voyeurs.
In Treading on Kings, Sternfeld took the street as his medium. The majority of the photographs are taken in the streets of Genoa, with the exception of the two photographs taken indoors at the Diaz School. The striking difference with traditional street photographic practices is that the streets of Genoa were devoid of their everyday life. In fact, the centre of the city was shut down and divided into three zones—the red, blue, and yellow zones—during the summit of the eight leaders. The red zone was around the Ducal Palace, where the summit was accommodated and was protected with wire fences from the protesters. The yellow and blue zones of the city were given to the protesters, but normal transportation was stopped, and many shopkeepers and coffee owners shut their shops and cafés for fear of them being destroyed by the “violent demonstrators.” The creation of red areas that demonstrators could not approach broadened the police strategies for the defence of the summit meeting places. These red areas acquired symbolic meanings for the demonstrators and can be perceived as “metaphors for an economic model that exiles millions to poverty and exclusion.”
Obviously, the conditions on the streets of Genoa did not resemble their customary life, and therefore Sternfeld had to work in different conditions from those in which earlier street photographers had worked. While his preference for photographing on the street may have put him in similar circumstances to other street photographers—such as the street as a location where the events unfolded, the spontaneity and motion of a demonstration, and the peculiarities of the street life as it unfolds in a demonstration—these elements differentiate his practice from earlier practitioners. However, Sternfeld deliberately chose not to look for random images of the demonstrations as they were unfolding on the streets, but instead he carefully chose his subjects, posing against urban backgrounds. His decision distances him from the almost random shooting of preceding representatives of the genre, as well as from their inability to define their subjects and their “apparent aimlessness and an attraction to drift.”
Anti-photojournalism’s relation to violence
Sternfeld’s avoidance of spontaneous shooting on the streets of Genoa is based on anti-photojournalistic principles. This distance from the tradition of photojournalism and its obsession with the worthwhile picture that would make headlines was also highlighted by the curators at the White Box Gallery. In their press release, the curators emphasised that Sternfeld’s approach to the events in Genoa greatly differed from the great majority of photojournalists who covered the summit, spending their time in the air-conditioned Magazzini di Cotone—temporarily converted into a significant broadcast studio—dining on pasta generously provided by the sponsor Barilla and gathering the official briefings of the summit. Similarly, his practice was entirely different from the photographers who wandered in the red and yellow zones looking for the moment of high violence that would make impressive headlines. Instead, Sternfeld was motivated by the question: “What did the banner-waving, song-singing, globally-wired ‘anti-global protesters’ actually want?”
Sternfeld's anti-photojournalistic concerns remind us of the critique that Allan Sekula also exercised on the genre. In his project Waiting for the Tear Gas [White Globe to Black], Sekula photographed the five days of protest against the WTO in Seattle in 1999. A part of his series of photographs was published in a collective book entitled Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, which consists of accounts of the Seattle demonstrations and the movement's goals and objectives. Sekula's photographic sequence captures the crowd that protested in Seattle—of all ages, dressed up or naked, trade union activists or feminists—"people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades." Zanny Begg, in her thoughtful account of Sekula's project, argues that Sekula provides an image of the crowd not as an "angry mob being manipulated or led from outside" or a "unified group of people who can be spoken for by a higher body," but as a "self-organising collection of singularities." This emphasis on the counterforce of neoliberal globalisation, the "multitude," which seeks to construct "another world," is indicative of Sekula's photography and its close relationship to the social and political reality, which is also manifested in his other contemporary projects.
Although Sekula photographed the evolution of the demonstrations, as many photojournalists definitely did, he clearly defined his practice as anti-photojournalistic. Sekula moved with the flow of the demonstration with "no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence." The photographer, in this case, becomes an integral part of the crowd, following the demonstration and being subjected to the police's tear gas. The small 35mm camera, the available light, and lack of digital manipulation of the colours cast by the street lights resulted in photographs of low technical qualities—a new way of employing a "strategy of de-skilling" as central to his critical realism.
Sternfeld employs a similar anti-photojournalistic mode, not so much in the technical features—in which he obviously takes a different strand from Sekula—but in his approach to any defining images of dramatic violence favoured by photojournalists. It is exactly the way that Sternfeld decided to treat the issue of violence that places him in total opposition to any photojournalistic project. Violence is nevertheless the focal point of his book, omnipresent in Stille's account of the events and implicit in most of the photographs of the book. Three of the five opening photographs and two of the four closing photographs depict the results of two peak moments of violence during the demonstrations: the violent night raid of the Italian carabinieri on the Diaz School; and the shooting of the young protester Carlo Giuliani by the police. Choosing to photograph the consequences of these two events, Sternfeld extends his critique to two major issues of photojournalism: the dramatisation of specific events and the omission of others. In fact, the violence in the Diaz School either never made it to the news—simply because the journalists were never there, questioning the omnipresence of the journalists and the intentionality on behalf of the police—or was mistakenly reported by newspapers such as the Daily Mail, as explained in part II. The raid became known only through the stories and personal reports that activists posted on websites, blogs, and more specifically on the Indymedia network. Almost seven years later, Nick Davies in his article in The Guardian brought the story back to the fore, as well as its main protagonists, who still seek justice, while the police officers responsible for the raids evade disciplinary and criminal charges.
According to these stories, on the night of Saturday, 21 July, policemen invaded the Diaz School, a dormitory for peaceful activists and the Indymedia centre. The police showed inexplicably violent behaviour towards protesters who were asleep or about to sleep and destroyed computers, video equipment, and printed material in the Indymedia centre. Sixty demonstrators were injured and ninety-three were arrested and mistreated by the police, who humiliated the protesters, sprayed them with irritants, forced them to stand for hours, and compelled them to recite Fascist slogans and songs. Galante vividly describes the moment that the policemen entered the school. According to her:
They run towards us, unleashed, and start violently beating inert peoplewho embrace each other in a desperate hope of escaping what is to come.They run towards those who, with their arms raised in gestures of peaceand submission, are hoping to reason with madness. Before my eyes,there is a massacre occurring, and nothing can be done. Soon, blood iseverywhere: heads, arms, legs, the walls, the floor.24
The destruction, disorder, and chaos during the raid were never depicted in the mainstream media. Sternfeld visited the site many hours after the events and tried to reconstruct pictorially what had happened.
The two opening photographs taken in Diaz School, where many demonstrators camped during the demonstrations, depict destruction: a smashed door and stains of blood on the floor of the school. What is interesting is that the captions that follow both pictures explicitly connect the destruction with the police behaviour. The captions read: "A door in Armando Diaz School after the police raid, Genoa, 21 July 2001" and "The fifth floor of the Armando Diaz School after a police raid, Genoa, 21 July 2001." In contrast, in a photograph of a smashed window, the caption states only: "A storefront on Corso Torino, 19 July 2001." In the photograph, some stones and a bottle on the front pavement are also visible, but there is no textual reference to the perpetrators of the deed—unlike with the previous two photographs that depict the results of violence performed by the policemen, Sternfeld does not make clear who was responsible for the violence. The decision to highlight the police's violent behaviour contradicts the established stereotypes of violent protesters as constructed by the mainstream mass media and indicates the clear political statement that underlines the whole book.
The closing photographs overtly refer to the shooting and death of the young protester Carlo Giuliani, another result of the extensive use of violence by the carabinieri. Nevertheless, Sternfeld comments on Giuliani's death in a very different way from the mainstream press, which made the photographs of his dead body front-page news. This deliberate choice can be perceived as a comment on the dramatisation of news photography, which most of the time leads to a certain degree of apathy, the transformation of "threat into fantasy, into imagery," and the reassurance that "it is them, not us." Martha Rosler, who brilliantly described what effect dramatic imagery may have on viewers, has concluded: "One can handle imagery by leaving it behind." Instead, Sternfeld showed that for many people—including himself—Giuliani's death is not something that they leave behind. The photograph that shows a kneeling man in front of a stain of Giuliani's blood on a Genoa street points in this direction. It is easily understandable that the death of this young activist may have had absolutely different impacts on the citizens who received the news in their homes through the mass media and the citizens who had also travelled to Genoa and participated in the demonstrations for similar reasons to Giuliani's. Remembrance of Giuliani and his tragic death has been significant among activists. To the same end, the accompanying caption of the last photograph in the series highlights the importance of his death for the movement: "You think that you killed him but he lives on us."
Police violence then becomes the central point of the book, and frames all the portraits. Alexander Stille argues that violence was the key point in the way that the summit and the events around it were understood. As he argued:
The genesis of and the responsibility for the violence in Genoa is complex,and the way in which the summit unfolded tells a strange story about thenature of democracy, governance and dissent in the age of globalizationand modern communications technology.
It is true that the events in Genoa became synonymous with violence for the mass media and the dominant political circles. Stille pointed out that the violence was performed by a small part of the movement. As he explains: "There were an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 demonstrators in Genoa of whom, according to various estimates, between 500 to 5,000 were violent." Sternfeld's avoidance of depicting any violent behaviour on behalf of the activists is distinctive. He seemingly sides with the majority of non-violent protesters who might otherwise be marginalised in the daily struggle for media coverage, leaving aside the part of the movement that responds to the media spectacle by staging spectacle. These "image events" for dissemination in the mainstream mass media are performed by a rather small part of the movement, mostly identified with small groups of young protesters such as the Black Block. The symbolic violence performed by such groups has been stigmatised by the majority of the groups that seek to develop non-violent tactics "both in principle (seen as a form of accepting the violence of the system and even more as a behaviour akin to war) and for their practical effects in isolating protest."
Sternfeld's references to violence are also evident in his series of portraits.There are portraits of injured protesters followed by their reports of the performed violence. One portrait is of a man who turned his back to the camera, the only portrait in the series in which the subject does not confront the camera. Through his statement, he touches upon two very important issues: the violence against the journalists, but even more importantly, the legitimisation of this violence. After the description of assaults he received by the police, the young man declares:
Today, Tuesday, I went to see a lawyer, who advised me not to report the carabinieri because, even if I have two witnesses, the police could either come to my home and beat me or say that they remember seeing me throwing stones, setting fires or doing other things that could land me in jail. And this was said by my lawyer.
The legitimisation of the police's violence is an issue that Slavoj Žižek discusses in regard to the way that the US authorities treat the Guantanamo prisoners. According to Žižek, their behaviour is in "a kind of in-between legal status," since they act as a legal power, but without being controlled and limited by the law. It is the same when the authorities who inflict violence on peaceful protesters act as a legal power, but are not subjected to the law. According to Žižek, "the paradox here is that of an empty space, a dead zone, that exists within the domain of the law but is not itself subject to the rule of law." The status of homo sacer of the prisoners—that is, that although they are biologically alive they are deprived of any legal rights—leads to the tolerance and, finally, the legitimisation of violence. The sustainability of this tolerance and legitimisation of violence is totally independent of the existence of an invisible threat, an omnipresent enemy. The protesters were seen as a forthcoming threat for the city of Genoa, with politicians and Prime Minister Berlusconi predicting scenarios of violent protesters and danger in the city. Under these circumstances, the police violence appears expected, if not justified. But as Žižek points out:
only by rejecting in principle the notion that torture is permissible even in dire circumstances (while knowing that we resorted to it in precisely such circumstances) can we retain the requisite sense of guilt and awareness of the inadmissibility of what we did.
This rejection of the notion of violence becomes even more important when we have to deal with the murder of a young protester. The book closes with a very strong photograph of Giuliani's family—his parents and his sister—sitting on the stairs of a historical building of Genoa. The accompanying comment reads:
Nothing is worth the life of a child. Nothing can bring him back to life for us—or for the young people like him. For this reason, we call for peace—a refusal of violence. We ask for the feelings of Peace, Tolerance and Solidarity to be the authentic values in which people recognize themselves, in order that the absurd death of Carlo should not become more absurd and useless.
Their comment underlines the importance of the negation of any kind of violence and is indicative of the growing criticism of violence within the movement, which in fact increased after the events of Genoa.
A Contemporary Photographic Practice
Although the book format, with the emphasis on visual and textual interaction, revisits twentieth-century documentary projects, the project's exhibition in the White Box gallery in New York raises interesting questions about the project's affinity to other contemporary art projects. In line with contemporary advances in photography, Joel Sternfeld's technique alludes to contemporary photographic trends. In a similar way to his book American Prospects, his subjects’ full awareness of the presence of the camera, their straightforward pose, the strict composition of his photographs, and the sequence of the portraits seem to perfectly fit into what Julian Stallabrass described as one of the most prominent and established trends in contemporary art photography. This prominent strand, which includes among others the work of Rineke Dijkstra, Jitka Hanzlová, Thomas Ruff, Céline van Balen and Gillian Wearing, depicts people in uniform series, in which the subjects—normally centrally placed—remain still in front of the camera, "showing little or no activity other than self-representation." Stallabrass argues that these projects privilege formality, standardisation, frontality, and centeredness in a quasi-ethnographical mode and raise interesting questions about the representation of identity and difference in the globalised art world.
The solitary character of most of the subjects in these projects, and in particular in Dijkstra's well-known large format portraits—their detachment from their social environment, and the affinity of their self-representation to predominant images of the fashion industry, as well as the identification of the subject and the viewer only at the level of the image—are intrinsic features of these images which "describe and also enact a world in which people are socially atomised, politically weak and are governed by their place in the image world."
Sternfeld apparently chooses but does not instruct his subjects—in a way similar to that of Dijkstra and Ruff—and the result is not an isolated and powerless subject whose image is just another commodity subject to the same logic of the market that all the commodities in the contemporary neoliberal economy undergo. In direct contrast to Dijkstra’s and Ruff’s large format portraits destined to meet the requirements of the contemporary museum logic, Sternfeld chose medium-size prints juxtaposed with text for the exhibition, replicating the same format of his book. The specificity of the subjects’ statements, which bring to the fore concerns about the loss of culture and values, economic inequalities and exploitation of the poor countries, poverty, consumerism, exploitation, sexism, and ecological destruction, leaves little space not to encounter these subjects as active political subjects. The framing of the portraits with the photographs of the Diaz School and the photographs about Carlo Giuliani provides the right framework to read them politically. Having taken a critical stance towards the stereotypical mass media representations of protesters as a violent mass, the project refashions the combination of photography and text—common in traditional documentary projects—to represent its subjects as active political subjects. This choice contradicts other contemporary photographic projects, with which Sternfeld's project shares common technical and aesthetic qualities.
The question remains why Sternfeld insisted on the use of the portrait as the most eloquent representational mode, given its use in contemporary art photography. This choice may also seem to be an oxymoron, if one considers the anti-photojournalistic claims of the project. It is, in fact, photojournalism’s general fondness for choosing representative individuals to stand in for the news story; these individuals often representing collective social action. This focus on the individual that disables the reader to relate the individual story with the social conditions that underpin the situation also characterised the documentary projects of the 1930s.
Sternfeld's choice seems deliberate in his effort to displace the crowd from view. The individual portraits can therefore be seen in contrast with stereotypical representations of the crowd, in particular with "emblematic" and the "oceanic" images of masses of individuals as modes of imagining the body politic. The photographic portrait seems then the most eloquent choice to visualise the constructive differences of the people who participate in the movement. These differences remain different even when the people meet together in the anti-G8 demonstrations to create common power. This multiplicity of singularities, which Hardt and Negri defined as multitude, differed severely from earlier social formations of the crowd and mob in its lack of passivity and centralised leadership. Sternfeld’s project is a serious effort to represent the multitude visually.
While these portraits are restricted in the art gallery and, therefore, their potential to challenge the dominance of TV and photojournalistic images that shape public opinion about protest is not without limitations, they are unique in their effort to bring to the museum an iconography of protest and activism pushed to the margins of artistic production. Seen along with new critical artistic formations, collective artistic work, and critical photographic projects—arguably seen as the result of the considerable impact that the emergence of the 1990s movements against neoliberal globalisation had on contemporary artistic and photographic practices—Sternfeld’s project raises interesting questions not only about the engagement of photography with activism and anti-globalisation politics, but also about the position of contemporary art in a continuously changing globalised world.