PHOTOTEXT ENGAGES - A VISUAL CULTURE OF ACTIVISM IN THE 20TH CENTURY

How does visual culture inform political debate? Both a tool of information, propaganda, counter-power and awareness raising, the phototext – formal device combining photography and text, and establishing by its assembly a unit of meaning – is fully part of the construction media of our contemporary democracies. Slogans, posters, leaflets, pamphlets, urban or physical interventions, strikes, demonstrations are so many artifacts revealing that militant memory is also experienced in a creative reconfiguration articulating text and image. Drawing up a panorama rich and varied with a hundred years of struggles through photography and text, this collection multidisciplinary and international, it brings together eighteen unpublished essays on the focus on phototext. From the anti-fascist photomontage of the 1910s to visibility strategies on social networks through its instrumentalization in the service of feminist, anti-racist and independentists, the book offers a history of social, visual engagement and creative.