Rotating archival photos can invert their political meaning to stage defeat.
Evidence
The show was a kind of reliquary for a bygone militancy. It was dominated by an enormous black-and-white print of the photograph of Piccadilly Circus that had hung — upside down — in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop Seditionaries. A stretched linen included the 1871 photograph of the Paris Communards standing over the toppled Vendôme Column — but the image had been turned on its side, so that it looked as if the restored emperor was once again lording it over the Communards, who now resembled corpses. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1274
Categorization
- FICTION: The rotated Communards photograph — heroes visually converted to corpses under a restored emperor — is a concrete visual device an essay on political defeat could analyze.
- XREF: connects to: Archival misplacement can expose documents stripped of their official framing
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Archival misplacement can expose documents stripped of their official framing