Images of protest have a visceral power to grab our attention.
Colin Leach has been studying how we react to different kinds of protest images. For example, an image of many police holding down one protester and an image of many protesters facing off against a few police convey very different messages about who has the power. Both protesters and police have an agenda for how they want to be represented, and this is as old as photography itself. But online news and social media bombard us with more protest images than ever before, so it’s more important than ever to understand their visceral power.