Photo Diary of a Revolution
Tish Stringer

These images represent the distribution of information in and to multiple means and ends. Many of these images show the joy of expression in the often face of great risk and oppression. Micro examples of a strategic macro swarm of expression at mass mobilizations.

The fact that I share these images now with you is to speak on behalf of the effect these images had on my source of inspiration to make media, and I distribute it by acknowledging where and how I saw these images. They were all passed to me by a movement of individuals who are committed to the same distribution of information as its own expression and protest to which I too am committed. When you step into the street and tell your story, pick up your camera or your pen, you will make new waves of expression. Becoming media. Effecting change. Telling our story, writing our history.

The revolution will be televised. It will be on-line, on the airwaves and in print. But it will not be produced by them. It will be produced by us. The first rule is the one on the doors of the Indy Media Center: Don’t hate the media, become the media… We will change the rules. When everyone is the media , then the whole world is always watching. In 100 years we will look back and scoff at the idea that only those with special training could work for the media. The concept will be preposterous, in-league with the idea that only rich men with property can vote.

—FTAA Diary- www.geocities.com/ftaadiary


E and cops

democratic national convention, chigaco, 1996

Countermedia cameraman arrested at a clinic defense

Countermedia was a predecessor to Indymedia, offering a grassroots media perspective on the events that transpired in chicago on the internet. An important difference between the two was that countermedia allowed journalists to come in off the street to post their stories and pictures, but did not have a system of open publishing from a distance. Open publishing is the keystone of the success of Indymedia.

This picture was my first real exposure to the passion of making media. Driving a large truck across the plains and deserts and by the ocean, we dropped in on the republican national convention in san diego; Crazy empty protest zone, walked with a camera and thought, lets check out the front, where the delegates entered under a bigtop maze of steel fencing.

Nothing was going on. A man with noisy, tattooed baby doll walked by and we talked with him about the convention, he said he had some puppets in the car. Okay, we collect the puppets and alt. noise contraptions from the trunk of his car. We put the camera away. Go back to the front and with drums and absurdist chants we began the road-kill puppet show. Engaging the approaching visitors with questions and gothic dancing puppets. Intrigued they move in to get a closer look, then recoil from the angel made of pigeon wings, "young republicans for a new police state".

We decide to pack up after an hour or so, just as the police are coming up, we thank the officer, pose with him for a smiling picture and leave. Pick up some boots and a sedan and head back across the desert, with william burroughs as the exterminating angel. We part ways at the mississippi, and you go on to the windy city to meet the democrats. I stay tuned to counter media to contract your plague of information. The virus inserts- a few days later this picture comes in the email. Like a visceral composure the image became part of my mimetic vocabulary. I saw the interest of the repressive state apparatus in keeping your virus away from others like me. And I knew, the truth was out there. We would bring it home, and send it out in canning jars full of images.

The cinema of the revolution is at the same time one of deconstruction and construction: deconstruction of the image that neocolonialism has created of itself and of us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality that recaptures truth in any of its expressions. The restitution of things to their real place and meaning is an eminently subversive fact both in the neocolonial situation and in the consumer societies.

-Solanas and Getino; Towards a Third Cinema

Steel wool
Combustion Symposium, Ypsilanti MI-1997

Pyrotechnic artist steven rife dances with an element, lighting the heavens with steel wool.

Now is the time of furnaces and only light should be seen —Jose Marti

Sat red girl
This photo is from the A-16 demonstrations against the imf and world bank in washington dc, 1999.

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