Square photography: picture taking and archival activism in 15M

ABSTRACT

This article considers the 15M archive as a site of meaning, knowledge, experience and activism where photography plays a crucial role. Especially in its digital incarnation, such a cause-based collection becomes a retrievable myriad of images that opens the movement to a new set of questions regarding its meaning and aftereffects. For 15M was also an image-producing event, and the constellation of snapshots it generated significantly contributed to what we can consider the visuality of the Spanish crisis. The origins and nature of the photographic images that compose that 15M digital archive – the ones taken in its iconic Madrid square, in particular – also shed light on the importance of a picture-taking practice that documents and, in fact, helps to configure 15M as emerging event.

KEYWORDS:

• 15M
• photography
• archive
• crisis
• visuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The existing literature on the financial crisis and the 15M movement is extensive and growing. In 2014, the volume 15MP2P (Serrano et al.) offered the first transdisciplinary, detailed look at the events of May 2011. Not much later, monographs by Moreno-Caballud (2015) and Snyder (2018) situate 15M in a broader context of cultural production and political resistance. A series of single- and multiauthor volumes have kept the critical focus on the questions brought to the fore by the movement and its aftermath, including the role of the political party Podemos. See Álvarez-Blanco and López-Quiñones (2016), Torres and Pereira-Zazo (2019), Flesher Fominaya (2020), Rodríguez López (2016) and, more recently, Monge et al. (2021).

2 Personal communication with the archive staff, fisico.centrodedocumentacion15M, 6 October 2020.

3 It must be said, however, that the exhibit took place in the Sala Prado 19, a narrow space with a separate entrance from the main building.

4 Ephemera from 15M already has a place in a prestigious private institution of learning. Princeton University’s Indignados/15M Movement Collection from Spain includes 316 items, most of them flyers and picket signs. The collection does not hold photographs, and it would qualify as an instance of what is known as “helicopter collecting”, whereby institutions descend, get what they want and place it in their archives.

5 The searchable catalogue is on the site https://archivosol15m.wordpress.com/about/.

6 The series of snapshots was subsequently arranged for exhibits in the collections of several major museums. It appeared in a different order in the book Five Days That Shook the World.

7 In 2012, the European Prize for Urban Public Space, a biennial competition organized “with the aim of recognising and making known all kinds of works to create, recover and improve public spaces in European cities” awarded a “special category” prize to “Occupy Puerta del Sol”.

8 The contentious relationship between protesters and law enforcement entered a new phase of vicious repression in 2012. The acts organized for 25 September of that year, called Rodea el congreso, resulted in sixty-four injured demonstrators and bystanders. Twenty-eight of them needed hospitalization. For the first time, antiriot police hid all possible identification, fully conscious that cameras have become one of the only instruments of civil defense.

9 FotogrAcción was a collective of activist photographers dedicated to documenting social movements and fighting misinformation from 2008 to 2016. Foto Spanish Revolution, also a collaborative project, had the same goals from 2012 to 2014.

10 Joel Sternfeld’s Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa in 2001 continues this tradition of conflict photography (2003). Sternfeld also traveled to the site of protest, Genoa in this case, and he, too, produced individual portraits of participants posing for the camera.

11 One only needs to compare this series with the ninety-nine pictures the self-described conceptual photographer August Bradley took of the protesters in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 to appreciate Bayer’s aesthetic choices here. Even though his declared intentions were to tell the story of the Occupy Wall Street movement through the individual faces of its participants, the dramatically lit extreme close-ups with a dark background emphasize the photographer’s gaze and skill and turn the photographed subject into an aesthetic spectacle.

12 As of November 2021, the Edu Bayer series of portraits has 77,555 views.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juan F. Egea

Juan F. Egea is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of La poesía del nosotros: Jaime Gil de Biedma y la secuencia lírica moderna (Visor, 2004), Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy and the Nation (UW-Press, 2013) and Filmspanism: A Critical Companion to the Study of Spanish Film (Routledge, 2020). He is currently working on a book-length project on the visuality of the Spanish crisis. Email: [email protected].