When everything burns: uprisings, violence, image

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the aesthetic and political dimensions of photographic images of the anti-racist acts and protests that took place in 2020. The objective is to discuss the different figures of violence in the images of protests of the movement #blacklivesmatter and the mobilizations for Black Awareness Day in Brazil, seeking to observe: the experience of violence as motivation of the insurgencies, the violence underlying the gestures of upheaval, the violence undertaken to suppress the uprisings and, finally, the percussive force of the images. Taking these images into account means, from a methodological point of view, not only to criticize the uprisings, but also to propose a criticism of the violence and the way the images operate in the face of the powers and forms of power that cross these manifestations in different directions. The images under analysis, chosen based on their wide circulation, were responsible for synthesizing the emotions of the revolt and witnessing, from the eye of history, the moments when the monopoly of violence is exercised and also put to the test, in which the violence is opposed to violence itself, in which everything burns and the pathos of indignation is not only represented, but also visually expressed.