Insurgent Archive: The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State
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Published:September 2023
Ileana L. Selejan, 2023. "Insurgent Archive: The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State", Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination, Christopher Pinney, The PhotoDemos Collective, Naluwembe Binaisa, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Konstantinos Kalantzis, Ileana L. Selejan, Sokphea Young
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This chapter analyzes the ways in which photography has been used within the context of the protest movement that began in April 2018 in Nicaragua. It discusses how the phone camera and social media became tools for demanding justice as well as for witnessing and documenting “live” history. The sudden appearance of new images in the public sphere manifested itself as an overflow of content against a backdrop of prolonged silence due to censorship. Correspondences with well-known photographs from the 1978–79 popular insurrection were tested, as the memory of the historic Sandinista Revolution was actively engaged with in the streets. The chapter revisits theoretical notions concerning the proliferation of images via photographic technologies in a revolutionary context, reflecting on what makes images particularly powerful and effective in an activist sense, spurring audiences into action.