Here I argue in an era of totalised media saturation and hyperreal spectacle, resistance, subsumed within an endless media clamour, becomes mere spectacle; as response, it is silence – not image or rhetoric – that may be our last, subversive act of refusal.
Over the past two years of the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people by Israel and its Western collaborators, I have been photographing a weekly gathering in the Gippsland region of country Victoria as part of the informal activist groups Free Palestine Wurruk and Free Palestine Gippsland. Most refer to these activities as a protest, or rally, I have come to refer to them as a gathering after the way the Quakers, if they sense the presence of the divine at their meetings held in silent contemplation call it a gathered meeting. I’m not sure that there has been a presence of the divine at our gatherings, but there has been a powerful sense of purpose, union, community and communion that belies the comparatively small numbers of people drawn to publicly express their solidarity, their fury, their discontent.
Free Palestine Wurruk is in many ways informational, consisting of a Substack website, https://freepalestinewurruk.substack.com, that highlights both historic and contemporary information about the 76 years of occupation, oppression, land theft, aparthate and the escalating genocide against the peoples of Palestine. As well as writing our own informational and opinion pieces, Free Palestine Wurruk produces leaflets, and weekly newsletters, and shares articles we find significant from other news sources, as well as sharing photography from our monthly and weekly gatherings. Free Palestine
Gippsland is focused on raising awareness, expressing our rage and sadness through street protests at Traralgon every Sunday and at Stratford on the last Saturday of the month. This region is of course a land that knows its own genocide, against the Gunaikurnai people – an attempt that has left legacies of loss, displacement, dispossession and cultural erasure. With respect to the elders and people of the Gunaikurnai, and the experiences of First Nations people across these lands, and the complexities of my own experience as a descendant of fracture, erasure and dispossession – of victim and perpetrator. This discussion, despite those parallels and interconnections, will focus not on the material, cultural and spiritual parallels of Palestinian and First Nations people under occupation and colonialism, that has been covered extensively elsewhere – see for instance Tasnim Mahmoud Samak’s article Indigenous there, settlers here: Palestinians in Australia in Overland (2024) – but on the seeming failure, in the moment of this genocide, of representation as resistance.
Positionality, Intersectionality, Interconnectedness
There is a contemporary demand in almost every discourse, whether it be artistic, political, philosophical, literary, journalistic or social, that we position ourselves in terms of sexuality, race, gender, knowledge, ideology, political spectrum and a whole range of other cultural marks and cultural markers. A confluence of such markers forms its own frame, that of intersectionality, usually considered from the left. As someone whose identity in so many ways is fractured rather than defined, I can only speak metaphorically. An intersection is a crossroads, where unless people stay in their own lanes and obey strict regimes of direction and speed they will crash. Both physically and metaphorically it involves various binaries and tangents, not in connection, but in opposition. Thus I will say the fractures on and abrasions of my cultural surfaces allow not for an intersectionality, but for an interconnectedness; my relationship is interconnectional, with the implication that the things that bring us together are not just in this cultural moment, but extend through time.
Process
With the above contexts in mind, what began as simply documenting and sharing photographs of our protests for the amusement of participants in our associated social media spaces, became something else; shared on our Substack, YouTube and through other social media venues, the images of our gatherings became a form of resistance in itself.
The material process was straightforward. Usually using a Fujifilm XT3 26 megapixel crop sensor digital camera, and most commonly an XC 55-230 or XF 50-200 zoom lens, I would capture still images, mostly in monochrome mode, sometimes in vivid colour, always with the aesthetic of the candid shot, of verité, of street photography. These I would then arrange and compile into a video on an iPad, sometimes adding music to emotionally colour the images. Street photography as a genre, however, often captures the world in terms of humans isolated and alienated within overwhelming built environments. In that context it becomes cold, stark, emphasising shadows, chiaroscuro, the artificiality and rigid lines of monumental architecture becoming unreal, a fabrication, a stage, a set, at once feeding the ego of both the photographer, the displaced gaze, and the figure posed within this bleak aesthetic, while dehumanising the mass.
My photos aimed to capture the emotionality of the unexpected moment. Moments of laughter, of anger, of futility, of contemplation, of simplicity, of camaraderie, of sadness, of union. Not Cartier-Bresson’s much misinterpreted idea of a decisive moment, where the elements in motion are rendered still in an intuitively captured coincidence of harmonious composition (Rubin, 2022) that transforms image into capital ‘A’ Art, an aesthetic that performs its register – I don’t really believe in any of these essentialities – but those subtle, fugitive and fleeting moments of emotion that give an image the weight and significance of real but transient human experience. Moments not of nostalgia, lost in the past, but fixed in a kind of no longer accessible space, in which the silence of a smile or a shout still noiselessly resonates.
Photo Compilation – Faces of Protest
Rhetoric
Thus this video, these photographs of a small gathering in the Gippsland region of country Victoria in support of peace, freedom and justice for the Palestinian people, opposing the occupation, aparthate and genocide committed by Israel and its collaborators, becomes not a record, not an archive but, in mute presence an act of resistance.
As an act of resistance I must first ask whether in critique it becomes something else; what ever terms I use to critique it, that is what it becomes; a political critique, a political document, an aesthetic critique, an aesthetic object, an historical critique, an historic text, a journalistic critique, a journalistic text. If an act of resistance becomes an object of critique, an object of consumption; it becomes a product.
Under the totalitarian marketplace perhaps the only way for something to remain an act of resistance is if it keeps a measure of silence. Thus, in the teeth of the spectacle, this will be a discussion of refusal, of boycott, of non-performativity in the face of the endless roar of totalitarian consumption, of stillness, of the held moment, of the withheld voice, of silence as resistance.
I must also ask whether the intent, the philosophy is purely a rationalisation, whether what it proposes has any effect outside of rhetoric.
Dialogue, Significance, Silence
Of course I do not claim that my photos of a small group of diverse Australians gathering, protesting, resisting the mainstream narratives supporting Israel’s genocidal ‘right to exist’ espoused by the media and politicians of this country are in any way equivalent as acts, messages, signifiers of resistance to those photos of the wounded and dead, those burned alive, torn apart, decapitated, eviscerated, raped, sniper shot through the heart and head, dug from beneath the rubble of homes, hospitals, schools destroyed in missile strikes by Israel and its collaborators we have seen every day for the past two years, and at interval over the past 77 years. I do suggest there is something deeply wrong in the way we now consider those images.
Take for example the Pulitzer and World Press Photo of the Year winning iconic image from 1972 known as The Terror Of War, which depicts a young Vietnamese girl, Kim Phúc, and her siblings and cousins, screaming in pain and terror, fleeing naked down the road followed by South Vietnamese soldiers after the US backed South Vietnamese Airforce napalmed the temple they were seeking refuge in. Kim Phúc, skin burned raw by napalm, survived only by tearing off her burning clothing.
The image is uniquely shocking; American critic and essayist Susan Sontag in her 1973 study On Photography comparing the image to thousands of moving images on TV suggested the still image “as a slice of time, not a flow” (2005:13) was uniquely privileged in its impact on cultural memory, and the barbarity of the image “of a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed with American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming with pain-probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities” (2005:13).
In Palestine we have seen moving and still images of no lesser barbarity perpetrated on Palestinian children on a daily basis every day for the past two years, and yet beyond platitudes and rhetoric world leaders, the media and much of the public at large for two years (and indeed 77 years) have remained unmoved.
As instance, this year’s winner of the World Press Photo of the Year is an image of nine year old Palestinian boy, titled Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, captured by Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for the New York Times. The two couldn’t be more different; Mahmoud in mellow colour, shadowed with an almost studio portrait aesthetic, composed, calm, despite the fact that his arms are missing, blown off in an Israeli missile strike, now healed, knobs of skin smoothed to a desert erasure, there is no immediate sense of violence in the photo; it is aftermath, the body colonised, unlike the photo of Kim, grainy film, black and white, in dismay and dismaying medias res. Indeed, the image of Mahmoud puts the viewer in mind of the armless figures of classical sculpture.
And yet the two are placed in dialogue, as are the conflicts. In an Al Jazeera article by Belén Fernández the title and subtitle asks, “From Gaza to Vietnam, what is the value of a photo? Two maimed children, two iconic images – and no end to barbarity in sight.” (Al Jazeera: 2025)
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/30/from-gaza-to-vietnam-what-is-the-value-of-a-photo
A picture speaks a thousand words (so the saying goes), and sometimes a handful of words speaks a thousand pictures, still none see, none listen.
As Alaa Alqaisi so desperately, so rawly, so eloquently says,
And I say this now, from the depths of grief and exhaustion: O God, we didn’t just knock on the walls of the tank. We did far more than that. We waved the torn limbs of our children like desperate flags. We showed the world how our sons and daughters walk barefoot on scorched earth, how they go to sleep hungry and wake up haunted. We put our humiliation on display. We peeled back our wounds and handed them over to the cameras. We screamed through every outlet we had — in Arabic and English, in poems and press releases, in death tolls and testimonies. We screamed, Ghassan. And we got the answer. We got it loud and clear.
(Alqaisi, 2025)
Despite the unrelenting clamour in word and image calling for a human response to brutal mass murder, our leaders, our media, those with the power to shape a human response to genocide have failed. We can only assume either there is something deeply wrong with their basic humanity, or else that there is a fundamental shift in the way we understand the image. Given our medias now are not sites of information or knowledge, but of contest, images are no longer true (if they ever were) but have become a competition, a commercial, a product, a contingent un/reality. As Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation, in the hyperreal age, representations no longer refer to a reality but circulate as simulations of meaning – consumed for their affective value rather than their truth. In this context, even atrocity is aestheticised, commodified, and ultimately neutralised within the spectacle (1994:2).
Every image, every statement of resistance becomes a hyperreality, an object of desire, caught entirely in a dialogical narrative, a contest, a metric of popularity. In the universal consumption of the totalitarian marketplace, we eat each other, our gaze consumes all that it is fed.
If there is any way to counter this dehumanising process, one we hope that is not only theoretical, that presents a fundamental return, it is to intervene in the chain of meaning before the statement, the soundbite, the image becomes part of the process of consumption. The only way I can conceive of doing that is to break the signifying chain. To escape the unceasing clamour, to find meaning we must descend not towards meaningless, but to refusal, to non-expression, to non-participation, to silence.
The Silence of the Dead
Critic and philosopher John Berger has said, “Silence, you know, is something that can’t be censored. And there are circumstances in which silence becomes subversive. That’s why they fill it with noise all the while.” (2005:243)
In the face of the genocide, the silence of the image cannot be censored, nor can it be reduced to part of the interminable contest, the dialogue, the debate, interlocution. The image wordlessly and undeniably speaks for itself. it is not the clamour of protest that will bring about change, but a refusal to participate in the spectacle of totalitarian consumption, to shun, to offer not rebuttal but silence like a mirror to the gaze of the murderers. There was a time before the regimes of universal law became privileged when those who went completely against a community’s values were shunned, ignored, or driven out in shame with the clangour of beaten pots and pans; rough music – a raucous white noise silence – a music we still hear at protests this day. In that noise, in that refusal, in that mirror, may they drown in their own reflection.
Beyond the moment of spectacle, and in these moments of life, we need to invoke this silence that shuns and shames. We need to invoke the silence of mourning. We need to invoke the silence of the dead. Not the clamour of demand, of desire, but the indelible hush of abjection.
Perhaps in that condition of irresolvable static, in the mass grave noise of that rough music, those who can act, will.
Still. I know none will listen. That this is yet another plea falling on deaf ears. That beyond the moment of contemplation in which this idea breathes its possibility, the clamour will return.
Perhaps in silence we can stand outside of this horror, outside of, as Aaron Bushnell said in the roar of his immolation, what our ruling class has allowed.
My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
We have seen the video, the image of Aaron Bushnell, engulfed in flames, outside the Israeli embassy, protesting the genocide of the Palestinian people and the savage new order our leaders, our media have made. Like so many images of Palestinian bodies, torn apart, shrouded, starving. They have been shared, circulated, captioned, memed, monetised, and, in their clamour, in the economy of noise, ultimately silenced.
Perhaps in silence, we can break the chain of meaning that has made mass slaughter a debate, not an atrocity. Perhaps in silence we can finally hear the cries of the living and the dead. Perhaps if we can find, in the still, silent plea of the figures in an image, we can find life, all life, sacred again.
References
Alqaisi A (2025) ‘We knocked until our hands broke’, Arablit & Arablit quarterly, a magazine of Arab literature in translation, https://arablit.org/2025/05/23/we-knocked-until- our-hands-broke/
Baudrillard J (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Berger J (2005) The shape of a pocket, Vintage Books, New YorkSammak T M (2024) ‘Indigenous there, settlers here: Palestinians in Australia’, Overland, 257, https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/nakba70/essay-tasnim-sammak/ p
Donegan, M. (2024) ‘Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside an Israeli embassy. It is our loss he is no longer with us’, The Guardian, 28 February. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/28/aaron-bushnell-self-immolation-gaza-israel/
Fernández B (2025) ‘From Gaza to Vietnam, what is the value of a photo?’, Al Jazeera, 30 April 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/30/from-gaza-to-vietnam-what-is-the-value-of-a-photo/
Rubin M (2022) ‘The decisive moment: what Henri Cartier-Bresson actually meant’, PetaPixel, https://petapixel.com/the-decisive-moment/
Sontag S (2005) On photography, Rosetta Books, New York
