ABSTRACT
The Gezi movement of 2013 was a turning point in the history of Turkey’s politics and social movements. The country saw an unprecedented visual production and image circulation through the protests and in the aftermath, both in conventional and social media. A number of visual elements contributed to the politicisation processes, including the photographs taken on site and their appropriations as illustrations. The Lady in Red photograph was among the first images to become an icon of the movement and achieve global resonance. While the protester was barely known by her name, the photograph joined a protest iconography of everybody figures, representations of ordinary people standing against the establishment. In politicisation processes, images of the common man and common woman perform an intermediary role between the individual and the universal to become everybody. While posing a symbolic challenge to the established order, they invite people to join a political struggle, to become activists. They create an aesthetic interplay by evoking temporalities in the image as they bring together the collective memory and an imaginary future. Everybody figures show the contentious dynamics of social relations and have the potential to reconfigure values and meaning-making systems. Going through the legacy of the Lady in Red, the essay offers a visual journey into why and how the photograph of an ordinary person, taken by an ordinary photographer, grows into a protest icon. It discusses contemporary popularisation practices through an image of the common woman by analysing its visual qualities for mobilising public affects.
