Out of Sheer Rage

“To be an activist,” the artist Martha Rosler said in a 2019 interview, “you probably have to be working intensively with a specific community and a specific issue or set of issues.” Rosler is well known for her expanded documentary practice, which has been called activism, as with If You Lived Here…, her polemic 1989 project on homelessness. In its companion book, she noted that “social activists, certainly, continue to recognize the importance of documentary evidence in arguing for social change.”

That relationship between documentation and activism threads through the work of several contemporary photographers and filmmakers in different ways: some work with specific communities on specific outcomes; some create or participate in activist campaigns to speak out publicly against governments; while others invoke activism through photography, at times as a form of protest. These approaches are not quite the venerable “critical realism” that the photographer Allan Sekula espoused, though they come close.

Activist art is always political, but not all political art is activist art. The fine line between them collapses often, and that’s a good thing. There have been many contemporary artists who have productively blurred this line. David Wojnarowicz’s iconic photostat (1990), which blends image and text, memoir and political action, comes immediately