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

Abstract

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