Beyond the Binary: Pursuing a Radical Photography

Written by Paige Glover

Since its inception, photography has suffered a double bind, caught between competing desires for indexical truth and subjective art. On the one hand, the medium can seize and memorialize moments in time, yet it remains bound to the subjectivity of its creation—a tension at the practice's very core. Between choosing a subject and exercising the politics of framing, we accept a degree of mediation between photographer and photographed, art and life. However, as theorist and critic Susan Sontag notes in On Photography, the constructed nature of the photograph is often willfully neglected in favor of the photograph's ability to index events. This tension in the ontological status of photography, both document and artistic construction, raises a significant challenge to the medium's political potential. But, where the 'real' and the staged, the fact and the fiction collide, offers a rich territory for radical contemporary photography. 

We live in an image-saturated world where the ubiquity of the visual reflects and manufactures our sense of reality. Billboards, 24-hour news cycles, social media (an infinite etc.)—what we upload, consume, and internalize takes another dimension in an excess of commercial-socio-political imagery. With diminishing faith in the photograph's documentary truth, the medium adjusts its priorities: if not capture the spectacle, why not disrupt rather than perpetuate it? This evolving agenda has considerable political capacity, already harnessed by young creatives, thinkers, and radicals. This essay will explore a framework for radical contemporary photography that goes beyond the truth/art binary and into a non-hierarchical standing.

Truth, Power, and Subversion

The burden of veracity has occupied photography since the beginning. Historical references are rich in this regard. From WWI photographers who made wartime horrors accessible for the first time to the Farm Security and Administration (FSA) photographers who chronicled post-Depression poverty to the Bang-Bang Club photographers who exposed the realities of South African Apartheid, the photograph-as-document has been an important site for cultural exposure.

The power of these images is generated not in their neutrality but in their use of artistic choice. For instance, composition and the choice to include (or exclude) certain visual items set the ground for an image's communicative power—that which shapes public sentiment. We need only look to Dorothea Lang's Migrant Mother to see the function of documentary photography as a revelatory practice and a persuasive one—both a record of suffering and a compelling political artifact.

In moments of global crisis, not unlike our own, the tension between truth and artifice amplifies. With propaganda and misinformation rampant, the need for truth aggravates. In that regard, documentary photography is often used as a propaganda-resistant tool, countering lies with 'raw truth.' The Vietnam War, for example, was the first televised conflict, the first to be mediated through the camera's lens. Photographs of napalm-stricken children and bodied battlefields contradicted the sanitized imperial narrative of the war effort. 

The photograph can exercise power over the Western narrative given its evocative and communicative properties as an art. Though it may be consoling to imagine the picture as an object of truth, photographs are fragmented, isolated moments of history. By their very artistic nature, the image privileges some experience over others. However, this is not worth refusing or fearing. Instead, we should lean into this tension and harness the tremendous political capacity of the photograph's position. The act of photographing is itself a political act—one that involves choices about what and how to see. Photography is not merely a vehicle for recording events but a means of producing and disseminating meaning. Its truth is always contingent; its objectivity is a myth but hardly a limitation.

With top-down power expressing itself absolutely and unethically—the inevitable outcome of authoritarian systems—the photograph has a renewed importance in the contemporary age. We need innovative and alternative ways of expressing power to fight this oppressive vertical weight, power from the people which functions laterally. The question becomes: how might the medium evolve to suit a people's agenda? A radical movement in the cultural conscience requires an equally revolutionary photography.

Rhizomatic Photography: Radical Representation 

We might look at Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's, A Thousand Plateaus, which advocates for the rhizome, a system of relations that rejects hierarchical structures entirely, privileging a more relational, associative, and fluid mode of thought. In photography, the rhizome offers a way of thinking about the medium that transcends traditional boundaries. It situates truth beyond the photograph, not as something capturable but synthesized in the lattice between multiple experiences, ideas, and struggles. Rhizomatic theory pushes us to consider photographs not as static objects but as parts of an extensive living process. 

Radical photography is not a matter of documenting the world 'as it is' nor constructing entirely alternate realities. Instead, it is a practice of connectivity: linking disparate moments, subjectivities, and contexts to subvert dominant modes of seeing and thinking, which are often oppressively Western. The rhizomatic photograph resists closure and renounces the fixity of meaning, providing room for opinion and experience to develop concomitantly. By embracing the ambiguous distinction between truth and artifice, radical photography can advance toward a visual language that reflects complexity.

The radical is not necessarily the new; it proliferates but not without credence to revolutionary acts and minds of the past. Although the rhizomatic approach to photography is relatively new, its ambitions have several precedents. Consider, for example, photographs of the May 1968 protests in Paris, which did more than merely record the events of a single moment. These photographs circulated between and further connected various student movements at a time of historical revolt. As such, they linked the local struggle to those more global and paved a critical path for collective solidarity and action.

Similarly, contemporary movements—for Palestinian liberation, the Chicano Movement, Indigenous resistance struggles, and anti-imperialist movements in the Global South—have used photography as a means of documentation and a critical tool in building global solidarity. They affirm the interdependence of our struggles, not as isolated activities but as nodes in a broader movement against imperial power. 

This year, activists across the globe harnessed the power of photography in encampments, on the streets, and in the digital realm to urge a complete boycott of brands and companies complicit and active in Israeli apartheid and push unequivocally for the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation. These photographic interventions sought to mobilize viewers and encourage solidarity. In step with the aims of radical photography, young people documented the fight for liberation without ascribing to the conventional boundaries between life and art, witness and action. Resisting the talons of simple binaries, images, information, and ideas of nuance circulated across borders from encampments in the United States and Europe to Palestinians in Gaza—photographs playing an essential role in coalition building.

Taking a photograph is critical to resistance—a reclamation of visibility, narrative, and agency. Photographers such as Mohamed Badane, Rula Halawani, and Tanya Habjouqa are creating powerful images that lift the curtain from life under Zionist occupation. Their photographs, each unique but involved in a similar enterprise, highlight the horrors, acts of resistance, and revolutionary joys of the Palestinian experience. Since the Nakba, visual culture has been critical in documenting displacement, dispossession, and resistance. Contemporary photographers are reclaiming the visual history of Palestine from colonial narratives. 

Radical photography is an intimate part of the decolonization project, from anti-hegemonic communities in the West to those fighting power on the ground in the Global South. It offers a way of seeing that resists simplicity and refuses oppressive Western narratives, possessing massive subversive potential. Radical imagery refuses a single, fixed meaning. It understands the power and complexity of the image when situated globally. Both a tool of power and a means of resistance, radical photography must embrace its inherent fluidity, resisting canonical (and colonial) conventions to be an effective vehicle of political thought and action. That is, as representations neither isolating nor generalizing but open, interconnected, and insurgent. A rhizomatic approach in photography initiates the viewer into a global dialogue that recognizes differences and nuances yet aptly isolates a single target for our disparate struggles: Imperialism.  

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Faulkner, Simon. “Photography and Protest in Israel/Palestine: The Activestills Online Archive.” The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2020, pp. 151–70.

Hayes, Patricia. “The Blur of History: Student Protest and Photographic Clarity in South African Universities, 2015-2016.” Kronos, no. 43, 2017, pp. 152–64.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.