Visual Activism Quotes

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

The truest protest is beauty.

But everyone cannot be there, and that is why photographers go there - to show them, to reach out and grab them and make them stop what they are doing and pay attention to what is going on - to create pictures powerful enough to overcome the diluting effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference - to protest and by the strength of that protest to make others protest.

Photography can still be used to champion activism and change. I believe this, even while standing in the cool winds of postmodernism... Postmodernism looked radical, but it wasn't. As a movement it was profoundly liberal and became a victim of itself. Precisely at this historical moment, when multicultural democracy is the order of the day, photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change. I for one will continue to work toward this end.

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

It is difficult to make political art work.

I became a photographer in order to be a war photographer, and a photographer involved in what I thought were critical social issues. From the very beginning this was my goal.

In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.

Street art, of course, is political, because it's illegal, so the very act of doing it is an act of defiance.

...and each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future - causing them caution and remembrance and realization.