A single viral image of police brutality converted ordinary citizens into protesters

Evidence

Then, photographer Osman Orsal produced an even more scandalous image. A young woman, elegantly poised and wearing a flowing red dress, was pepper sprayed at close range by the Turkish police. After seeing this on Twitter, a lot of people felt like Hazar, a shopkeeper in the bazaar from a middle-class family. He said: “A sandstorm is erupting, and I want to be one of the pieces of sand. I just want to support the people.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Precisely parallels the ch11 note that a single viral image converted an Egyptian bystander into a revolutionary. — connects to: A single viral image converted an Egyptian bystander into a revolutionary — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 220; Police violence against protest organizers turned leadership figures into martyrs — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 368; Early anti-war marches gained media attention only through police violence — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 367 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Why does a single aesthetic image of a vulnerable victim outperform hours of footage in converting bystanders? Worth chasing the visual-rhetoric literature.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Police violence against protest organizers turned leadership figures into martyrs #corroborates (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 368
• Early anti-war marches gained media attention only through police violence #corroborates (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 367
• A protest’s media success can diverge from its organizers’ goals #complicates (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 393
• Repeated police stops erode citizens’ sense of equal standing and legitimacy of law #complicates (0.70) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 440