Slices of resistance
29 October 2024I get the sense from the photography content I consume that taking photos at protests is looked down upon by people who get their thrills from looking down on things. On one hand, I can see the point of view that it’s like street photography on easy settings with so many people, so many expressions, so many signs and no reason to worry about the thorny consent issue because they’re large, public events.
On the other hand, however, even now in a time when it feels like rallying is making little or no impression on those in power, I think it remains genuinely important to capture what people are protesting about as a matter of record. We can look back today on protests held during the black civil rights movement with a certain romanticism, and while racism is far from over, the history stands. Today might seem banal, ordinary, some days bordering on futile, but tomorrow it will be history. We hope the monsters we protest against will be history too, soon enough.
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My first experience of protest photography came on 5 November 2013, just under a month after the latest round of destruction in Gaza commenced. It holds personal significance for me because it also came just over two weeks after I was discharged from hospital, where I spent some time being treated for suicidal ideation. It was also the first time after my discharge that I was trusted to go out alone, and my first time in quite a while taking photos. My low mood had sapped my desire to take my camera anywhere, but I was well aware of the protests having watched the opening atrocities on TV from my hospital bed, and something told me it’d do me good to go.
While the circumstances were and remain utterly horrible, it gave a shot in the arm I think I needed. I was energised by feeling like a part of something, and having so many potential shots at seemingly every angle. I buzzed around the huge (and under-reported) crowd like a man possessed, desperate to document everything I could.
I’m not going to pretend my attendance at rallies since then has been incredibly consistent – my mental health struggles have continued and have left me facing periods of extreme burnout, and there have been times when I’ve doubted the effectiveness of the marches to deliver liberation to the Palestinians and other oppressed populations around the world. That point may stand, but it doesn’t diminish the importance the rallies hold in giving a group of people a voice that deserves to be heard, and in bringing people together under a common cause, letting us all know we aren’t alone at a time when loneliness, isolation, and insignificance are exactly what the genocidaires and their allies want us to feel.
I wish we didn’t have to rally for something so... obvious. Of course we’d want an all-powerful band of nationalist extremists to stop bombing and slaughtering the innocent in hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, and then doing celebratory dances about it and posting them on TikTok like complete and utter irredeemable dickheads. Why is this even happening in the first place? But it’s a movement I’m glad to be a part of, if glad is the right word, and I’m glad to share some photographs I’ve made here with you.
This first shot is one that drew a kind comment from a very accomplished photographer who has since become a friend of mine, so for that reason alone it means a lot to me. It’d be very easy to just take lots of photos of witty signs (and to be clear, I do that too), but I’m drawn to interesting light more than anything, and I particularly like it here.
That same interesting light is a feature of this shot. I share it often because I find it very striking, and I hope others do too. The sign is, of course, very clear in its message, and I vividly remember the quiet, almost defiant dignity of the gentleman holding it while the police inched up behind him. The tote bag he holds adds a hint of the everyday too. I imagine this will always be one of my favourite shots.
You can get a pretty good idea of the scale of the early rallies from this shot, taken across the road from the famous façade of Flinders Street station. Reports from the mainstream media outlets generally put attendance figures at around 15,000, but I’m certain the real figure was closer to 50,000, if not higher. This is only a fraction of the crowd. Numbers have dwindled somewhat since then, but I’ve felt fatigued at times so I can’t judge others for feeling the same way or looking for other channels.
Another thing the media is guilty of is portraying rallies as violent gatherings of angry, ungrateful ne’er-do-wells. I always try where I can to find scenes that disprove this notion, moments of warmth, showing affection, care, even joy. I was pleased to capture this moment of two ralliers (if that’s a word) sharing a tight hug, and it was by no means the only one I saw that day.
You can’t see her face very well because I turned up the blacks to make the text more punchy, but the woman holding this sign seemed to end up in my vicinity every week for a little while, and usually with a funny US-centric sign. I could be wrong, but I assume she’s American. Australia remains firmly attached to the United States in an interesting geopolitical play on the online parasocial relationship, and with the 2024 US Election looming that rings truer than ever. Biden dropping out for Kamala Harris hasn’t changed my assessment of the battle as one between a sex criminal and war criminal. Other candidates are available for those who care to look.
The big voices at the rallies get an awful lot of credit, but I have so much admiration for the stewards and legal observers who are there week after week, keeping the rally on route, on message, and safe. Safety has been an issue on occasion, thanks to occasional threats from pro-Israel protesters and rather more frequent instances of over-zealous policing. Everything about rallying for this cause is sad, and the fact that some people – including working photographers – now carry goggles with them to protect themselves from pepper spray is just another layer of sadness on top. Anyway, here’s a shot of a rally steward wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a slogan that draws far more opprobrium than it should.
Back to my earlier point about moments of warmth. How violent and dangerous can a gathering be when a tiny little girl, maybe two years old, can wander away from her parents and stand in the middle of the road and come to no harm, because everyone else on the scene is looking out for her? Did anyone from the Herald Sun bother to report on that?
There are always so many children at the rallies, marching with their parents, siblings, friends. I made a comment on Instagram several months ago when I was beginning to feel frustrated and impatient that maybe the rallies were too safe and needed to be more spiky, partly because it felt like we weren’t being heard and partly because everyone else thought we were a band of raging miscreants anyway. A follower and fellow rallier made the point in response that while perhaps there was a time and place for more forceful expressions of our anger, that the Sunday rallies provided them with a safe place to include their children in expressing solidarity with their fellow Palestinians. I have no argument.
Here’s a shot of the sign that inspires the title of this post. Sometimes I’ll see a sign from a distance and know I absolutely must capture it, and this was one of them. This week, a watermelon on a t-shirt was censored from UK television because it was deemed a symbol of ‘genocidal intent’. You know, unlike the weapons.
I tried to be a bit Saul Leiter with this shot, and while it would have been nice to have a clear face and/or keffiyeh in there, I still think it’s an interesting capture. The group referenced in the poster, incidentally, are not so good from my experience and those of others I’ve heard about. One of the great shames about large protest movements is that inevitably they’ll attract entities who, at best, lose sight of the issues or at worst, use the issues for their own advancement.
I’m not sure if the statistic cited on this sign remains accurate, but either way it’s alarming and sickening. Western countries love to preach about family values, and increasingly about the importance of having and raising children, but it’s rather difficult to take this rhetoric at face value when families are torn about by weapons they happily provide to a nation with a track record in using them indiscrimately. This is a war on children, women, men, transgender people, everyone, but I think the scale of devastation on children is what historians will judge this most harshly on.
Most of the images you’ve seen so far were taken in bright conditions, but I can attest to the fact that many people will rally whatever the weather. This shot was taken on a truly miserable Sunday, on a telephoto prime I’d just picked up (weather-proof, thankfully).
I included the previous shot to provide context for this one, because if only I’d pointed my camera a little lower or moved a little further back to include the word ‘Die’ on the boy’s sign, I think this would be a far better shot. I really like how his face is lit, and I think black-and-white works well too.
The next three shots were taken at the Block the Dock protests in Port Melbourne, with the intention of blocking ships from loading goods destined for Israel. The days I swung by were relatively peaceful, but they still featured the most heavy-handed policing I’ve seen in person so far. I was driving there one evening when I took a call letting me know a close contact had COVID, and as a result I missed the evening when things really kicked off. Not that I want things to really kick off, but the budding photojournalist in me was disappointed not to be a part of it. Still, this shot’s pretty cool, and a neat demonstration of the contrast between the aggressive hordes in uniform and the easy-going protesters.
Look at the sky in this shot. Beautiful. The man here is walking across a high gate to play lookout for any increases in police presence or trucks arriving with the intention of loading. There were others up there too, but this was my best shot of any of them. The whole thing felt like a real team effort. It should also be noted that there was more effort on the part of the protesters to ensure any affected workers didn’t lose out financially than anyone would give credit for.
Sometimes at a protest I’ll see someone and simply think, ‘they’re really cool’. To that end, I present this image. No further commentary is needed.
I’ve always had a bit of an anti-police streak in me, which you can probably sense by now. I’ve been subjected to violence on more than one occasion in my life, and they’ve never provided me with even the slightest bit of help. So you can imagine why I felt compelled to take this shot.
Back now to cool people, this time at the Invasion Day rally which was held on the public holiday known as ‘Australia Day’ to the incurious. The causes of liberation for Palestinians and Indigenous Australians have long been intermingled, and the 2024 Invasion Day rally effectively merged with the regular Free Palestine march to draw a truly enormous crowd. This shot was taken ahead of the front of the march because it was the only place where I could move.
Staying with the Invasion Day rally, and I’m not one to praise my own work but if I saw these next two images on another photographer’s feed, I think I’d be very impressed. I take a lot of quiet, still suburban scenes when I’m not at rallies, so I like how these ones show I can also capture some raw kinetic energy. What a character this woman is.
This shot is just daft. It’s from a rally that made its way indoors into the Melbourne Central shopping mall, and it was fun to see a colourful cast of characters riding escalators alongside the general public. I can’t remember if the expressive man in the back of the shot was part of the rally or very much not a part of it. He could go either way.
I’m not a fan of Taylor Swift. I think her music is fair-to-middling but more than that, I don’t like what she represents as an incredibly wealthy and conventionally attractive white woman who could move mountains if she so wished but will never truly disrupt the status quo because that’s what got her where she is. That said, she’s undoubtedly a powerful force, or more to the point her fans are, and it’s a shame that more Swifties weren’t drawn into the struggle like these two. Maybe Palestine would be free if only Tay-Tay would find some moral fibre and do something. Instead she’s simping for Kamala.
Here’s another instance of me using the police as a foil of sorts in a shot. I took quite a few frames of this scene in a quick burst, and this is the shot that came out best, with the blankness of the policeman’s expression in stark contrast to the protester yelling in his face through a megaphone. I think this shot was taken outside McDonald’s, an establishment which the police take great care to protect with it being a prominent boycott target.
This one just amused me. We don’t see many people at the rallies wearing novelty costumes, which is a surprise now that I think about it.
This is another of my favourites, and comes from a more recent rally where I started feeling more confident about placing myself in positions close to the people leading the chants with their drums and megaphones. I like to photograph children at the rallies where appropriate – I’m encouraged by their presence, even if they unintentionally provide a stark reminder of the frightening volume of child deaths in Gaza and elsewhere. And who is a protest for if not for the children?
Ah, this was a memorable scene. The 52nd weekly rally naturally marked a full year of this stage of the genocide, drawing a larger crowd than recent rallies had and, accordingly, a larger police presence. On this occasion, they also brought horses, who being horses did their business in the middle of the street. The police made no effort to clean up the mess left on the agreed protest route, and a protester ultimately showed up with a bin liner to tidy up the scene. The thought occurs that if any of the protesters’ dogs (and there are often many dogs in attendance) did soemthing similar and their humans didn’t pick up after them, the police might take a dim view.
I own several keffiyehs these days, but I only know how to wear them in the style of a scarf. I wish I’d recorded this scene as a video because I’d really like to know how to tie one up fully around my head. Wearing a keffiyeh this way covers the wearer’s face, and the unfortunate truth is this may be necessary for some. And goodness knows the far-right protesters who occasionally pollute the city have no issues covering their faces.
I’ll end it here with a shot I took recently, with the light flowing very nicely through the huge Palestinian flag. I’m not sure if the two boys are brothers, but I think they may have been, and if they are I think this was a cute moment between siblings.
At time of writing, the next Sunday rally in Naarm/Melbourne will be the 56th in a row. 56 weeks, and it seems like it’s only getting worse. I have no idea when this will end, but I hope anyone reading this can see beyond religious and political obfuscation to the heart of the matter, that slaughtering civilians on their land is indefensible, and the fact that it continues is a stain not only on the direct perpetrators, but the entire international community that fails miserably and repeatedly to stop it.
I hate it here, but here I am. Here we all are.
Thanks for reading.