Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950-Present

Flashpoint! surveys how photography has printed protest, not just photographed it, from mimeographed strike handbills to museum-shelf photobooks, treating cheap, hand-distributed print as seriously as fine bindings.

Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich edited the book. 10x10 Photobooks published it in November 2024 as a 576-page anthology. It gathers 760 images from photobooks, zines, posters, pamphlets, independent journals, and alternative newspapers documenting protest and resistance from 1950 to the present, drawn from more than twenty countries. Seven chapters organize the material: Anti, Gender, Displacement, Race and Class, Environment, Political, and War and Violence. The book moves between canonical photobooks and ephemeral material like strike posters and underground newspapers. Its argument is that photobooks belong back among the everyday objects of protest they were often made to be, not treated only as precious objects. Essays come from Makeda Best, Hannah Darabi, Arthur Fournier, Marc Feustel, Kerry Manders, Elisa Medde, Mark Sealy, and Pauline Vermare.

It is the sixth thematic anthology from 10x10 Photobooks, a nonprofit founded in 2012 to build public engagement with photobooks. Earlier surveys covered Latin American, African, Japanese, Chinese, and Middle Eastern photobook traditions.