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The display of Allan Sekula's Waiting for Tear Gas (white Globe to Black) at Tate Modern from July 2013 to May 2014 coincided partly with Liberate Tate's creative civil disobedience against Tate's engagement with their sponsor British Petroleum. The article examines these two parallel episodes of Tate's recent institutional history, focusing on the tension emerging from the Tate's display of an artwork, which stems directly from a grassroots activist movement, and the institutional reluctance to engage with an artist-activist collective that targets the museum itself, or its sponsors. The article argues that Sekula's artwork and Liberate Tate's collaborative artistic interventions and participatory performances are part of a horizontal and rhizomatic network of anti-capitalist struggles against the privatisation of every aspect of life, the destruction of the environment and the degradation of human relations and attest to their unfinished nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Marxist historiography, this essay examines the crowd as a marker for collective life in contemporary photography. In contrast to the mass media's demonisation of the 'mob' and art photography's evacuation of the crowd, it looks at three critical projects - Chris Marker's Staring Back; Allan Sekula's Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black); and Joel Sternfeld's Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa - that present a 'horizontal' image of the crowd from below which disfigures the view from above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay deals with the way Palestinian villages, emptied during the 1948 war when their inhabitants fled or were expelled, were visually preserved in Israeli consciousness. The essay analyses a group of photographs in official Israeli archives that were taken by Israeli photographers between 1948 and 1951. These images, taken for Israeli national propaganda to describe the new Jewish immigrants who had been settled by the new Israeli state in these villages, show how they implement the Zionist world view. In contrast to these purposes, however, reading these institutional photography archives also makes it possible to learn about Palestinian identity before 1948 and gain insight into the Palestinian people, who are missing from these photographs. The essay shows how the manner of reading these archives makes possible the extraction of different layers of meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]