Discussion Forum Post

Discussion Post

Photography and film are now sought in a growing number of participating devices photography workshops, urban walks, participatory urban development projects or community planning, etc., on the initiative of the people or actors institutional. Furthermore, the recent revolutions in the Maghreb countries or the Indignés and Occupy movements in Europe and North America have shown that photographic or film images, produced by professionals taking part alongside the demonstrators or by the participants themselves, play a central role in this type of struggle, through digital media registration such as mobile phones and the use of web 2.0 for the dissemination of images. 

Images, whatever their nature or support, are the visual inscriptions of knowledge about the social world, which it orders and ranks. As such, they can be brought into play in social relationships and help to establish or destabilize them, thus functioning as instruments of power. Compared to other types of images, photography and film have specific characteristics that justify the special attention given to this issue.

One of the first powers attributed to the image is to make the invisible visible. Although this issue is common to action on the city and to collective action, the use of photography and film does not respond to it in the same way in both fields. The urban discipline has codified, over its history and its institutionalization, a specific imagery which combines three objectives: to know, to think, to act. Photography and film are only very marginally part of this imagery, because these two mediums are associated with the common perception from which urban planners precisely want to stand out. In other words, the “invisible” city that the specific imagery of urban planners shows has gradually obliterated, within this discipline, the city that we have daily in front of us and that are reproduced by photography and film. The use of these two mediums in contemporary participatory urban planning experiences thus testifies to a return of sensitivity in urban planning, which goes through the increasing consideration of common experience and "usage knowledge" in the elaboration urban projects. Conversely, even if the researchers who analyse them have little interest in images, ordinary perception is a central issue in the struggle for social movements. The latter favour photography and film because they allow, because of some of their specificities, to act directly on ordinary perception, to inform it and, in some cases, to transform it.

By analysing the way in which photography and film are mobilized in participatory urban planning experiences and by social movements, we will show that both are ambivalent instruments of power: in the hands of the elites, these images reiterate the social rites which consecrate their power through the recognition of their intellectual, moral, statutory superiority, etc. ; appropriated by dominated social groups, they potentially contribute to subvert the hierarchies and orders instituted by acting on social representations of the world. In other words, the effect of power that these images exert depends on their uses.