Image, Touch, Possibilities: A Photograph from the 2013 Bulgarian Protests Travels the World

Valentina Tomov

doi:10.18357/anthropologica6412022364

Authors

Valentina Tomov McMaster University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica6412022364

Keywords:

image, protests, Bulgaria, the political, hope, the possible, Image , protests, Bulgaria, the political, hope, attunement, imagination, the poetic, the possible

Abstract

This paper follows the lives of a photograph, which captured an
unlikely gesture amidst a scene of injury during the 2013 mass protests in
Bulgaria. It tracks the image’s impacts by focusing on six different registers:
the ethnographer, the photographer, the girl in the photograph, a blogger
and participant in the protests, global image-sharing sites, and a Hollywood
production. The writing strives toward an attunement with the affective force
of the image and toward making visible some of the ways it manages to disrupt
and reconfigure existing worlds, brighten atmospheres and lives, and create
desire and anticipation for a world-in-common.

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