Reflecting on Visual Activism at Caltech

Political activism can take myriad forms: petitions, lobbying legislatures, demonstrations, protests, strikes, boycotts, and even riots. All are aimed at communicating something to an audience, and frequently a large audience at that. These are attempts to be heard.

Crucially, they are also attempts to be seen: to gather people physically, occupy spaces, carry signs, write slogans, and, often, to create a visual spectacle that is arresting and provocative. Whether it is an unconsciously produced visual effect of protest or a carefully curated image or set of images intended for maximum dissemination across media channels, the visual elements of activism raise questions at the intersection of art, rhetoric, politics, psychology, and sociology.

In her spring 2024 course, Visual Activism, Caltech's Anna Stielau, Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor in Visual Culture, encouraged students to ask questions such as "Why do organizers turn to visual culture to communicate demands?" "What are the potential limits of representations?" "Can art help us to understand, enact, or imagine politics otherwise?" Visual activism, Stielau explains, "goes above and beyond art. It's a big-tent term that names a range of practices that employ the visual as a political tool, from livestreaming police violence to snapping selfies that fill a void in mainstream media." The phrase "visual activism," now in relatively wide circulation, was popularized by photographer Zanele Muholi, who described their photographs documenting black queer identity in South Africa as visual activism.

Stielau came to questions of visual activism as an art student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in the 2010s, where she was specializing in historic photographic techniques. It was a turbulent time on the campus as students protested against institutional racism and the legacy of apartheid in education. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign aimed first to remove a prominent statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British migrant to South Africa who made a fortune in the diamond trade, rose to political prominence in England's Cape Colony, and founded the state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which he named after himself. But soon the movement adopted a broader agenda that Stielau describes as "a large-scale national effort to try to reduce the costs of higher education and rethink a curriculum that was profoundly untransformed post-apartheid."

"As a photography student, I was impressed with how strategically students were using media," Stielau says. "I became super interested in how protests would be staged to end up as an image. Student activists were so savvy about social media and the ability of visual materials to broadcast information."

Stielau's interest in how visual media are harnessed for social change inspired her to apply for a PhD in media studies at New York University, where she studied what she describes as "the intersection of activist politics, fine art, and questions of media and technology."

"We live in such a highly mediatized moment," Stielau explains. "In a lot of ways, the primary mode of communication now is visual. And the visual is more pliable than other modes of communication. You can get around national borders, language constraints, and so on, and people can bring different lenses to the interpretation of images."

To some extent, this state of affairs is fueled by quantity—by the actual mass of images we produce and consume. "We are now producing more images in every minute today than were taken in the entire 19th century," Stielau notes. "We are taking upwards of 5 billion pictures a day. It's an inconceivable volume of information."

And these images are traveling freely. "Something like 5 billion of the 7.8 billion people on the planet are now social media users. Everyone is carrying around a recording device that has the capacity to not only produce images but also to share them. This is new, it's exciting, it's different," Stielau says.

In her spring 2024 class, Stielau was intent on giving her students the opportunity to not only view and analyze visual activism but also to create it. "The students engaged in a creative project in which they used writing exercises to figure out what they think about a specific issue," Stielau explains. "Then they needed to find a way to visually express that sentiment."

Students responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. Some designed posters while others took photographs or created memes. One student painted a mural. "I'm interested in thinking about activism as a form of communication that one can master. It really is just a form of persuasive argument," Stielau says. "We are thinking about rhetorical tactics and about images as a part of these tactics."

The course highlighted a broad variety of forms of visual activism by bringing in speakers, some local and some from very far away. For example, Brenda Perez, the director of Restorative Justice for the Arts, spoke to the class about preserving murals in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles that are in danger of erasure as this area becomes more gentrified. The class also hosted Sydelle Willow Smith, founder of an organization called Sunshine Cinema that travels around Africa offering solar-powered film screenings, including, most recently, films about the Herero and Nama genocide that occurred in Namibia under German colonialism.

"Many of my students grew up as iPad children in a fully digitized moment. They have no pre-internet imaginary," Stielau says. "I understand my job to be de-familiarizing their visual environment so they can encounter it anew and think consciously about how they want to interact with and use it. If I can teach them to be sensitive to questions of audience or to think about form, they can apply these things irrespective of the messages they are trying to communicate."

Under the auspices of the Caltech–Huntington Program in Visual Culture, Stielau also organized a one-day symposium, "Futures of Visual Activism," held on May 31, to bring together artists, designers, filmmakers, and scholars exploring the landscape of art, media, and politics as it is being enacted and transformed today. "In the end, the symposium was divided into two roundtables and a keynote from one of the founders of the academic discipline of visual culture, Dr. Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University," Stielau says. "Because it united people working across a wide range of sites, issues, and visual media, from data visualizations of forced evictions to queer modes of self-imaging, it was a wonderful opportunity to share ideas and tactics, and ultimately locate our projects in a common conversation."