Last Saturday I was fishing in my favorite place at Central Park Lake, on the downside of a big rocky outcropping that juts into the water. After weeks of trial and error, I had perfected the perfect bait for the carp used to eating leftover bread tossed out by tourists for the cute ducks and little turtles paddling on the surface. I threaded a long-shank hook through a hard crust of day-old baguette for buoyancy and packed a ball of Wonderbread around the bend to hide the hook, lend some weight, and dissolve slowly underwater. Watching for the swirl in the water that signified a carp I cast out and almost immediately got a hit. It was a monster. My rod doubled and my drag squealed. Reeling in slowly and playing the fish carefully to keep it on the hook (since it’s all catch-and-release I had pinched the barb) I got the yard-long primeval looking beast to shore. Wanting to prove to my disbelieving friends that there are, indeed, fish in Central Park and I was, in fact, catching them, I searched around in my jeans pocket for my smartphone to take a picture… and in doing this released just enough pressure on the line for the fish to do one final flip, slip my hook, and head back into the lake.
My friend and fellow activist David Solnit once said to me, “You have to think of your protest as a picture, because that’s how most people will see it.” David knows what he is talking about, as one of the leaders of Art and Revolution he was largely responsible for the look and feel of “The Battle for Seattle” the Anti-World Trade Organization protests in 1999. While the feel of the protest is important to those directly taking part, and even those directly targeted, most people in our mass-mediated age will experience the protest through pictures. This was something recognized early, and brilliantly, by the US Civil Rights movement who choreographed such events as Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat and the racist violence inflicted upon peaceful protesters at lunch counters and on city streets with more thought and precision than a theatre director. When working with activists brainstorming new tactics we will ask them to act it out their intervention and then freeze in a tableau so we can all get a sense of the picture the protest will convey. This is good activist practice..and it’s also important not to get so concerned about looking good and capturing the picture that the reasons for doing the protest are overlooked. If the importance of the picture replaces the importance of the action then you are in trouble. Challenging and changing power is what is important, and a good picture is good only as a means to do this.