Screening Protest by Alexa Robertson

Author:Alexa Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

In World Press Photo . . .

The WPP Photo of the Year was from the Tehran protests. Italian Pietro Masturzo won the prestigious award with photographs of the rooftop protest that took place after dark, a form of protest with roots in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with protesters’ calls of ‘Allahu akbar!’ and ‘Death to the dictator!’ echoing across the city. Masturzo’s Photo of the Year centres on a woman in a light-coloured dress standing at the edge a roof with her hands cupped to her mouth, calling into the darkness. The photograph is taken from slightly above the woman, and the dark rectangular shapes of surrounding buildings fill the frame. The few illuminated windows contrast sharply with the shadows and muted colours of the cityscape. In Masturzo’s prize-winning series of nine photographs of ‘the rooftop protests’, the figures are blurred, consistent with the muted aesthetic, but the technique also shields these protesters’ identities. The photographs include visual signs of daily life on the roofs of Tehran, amid TV-antennas and the round forms of satellite dishes. One image portrays several young people seated under a line of laundry smoking, and the final image shows a brother and sister embracing. The WPP photographs contrast sharply with the TV coverage of the tumultuous protests in the streets and, like the Greece example from the year before, portray different protesters from those seen on television news. Noteworthy, too, is that Masturzo’s images of these shadowy figures calling into the night extend the visual frame to include an audio sensibility.

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