ABSTRACT
The collapse in consensus about the nature of society was, at once, a crisis in the intimate: a collapse in consensus about the identities of men and women. It was not the photographs alone which convinced the urban populace of a crisis calling for action in the countryside. Irreparable rifts had opened between people's desperate experience and fragmentary word-of-mouth knowledge of the crisis, and the anodyne view offered by those in whom they had invested their trust. It was a speech impelled by a crisis in power, and one which was consequendy invested with multiple attempts to supplant that power. Within the workers' photography movement the crisis was construed within the terms of class oppression and revolutionary change. In relation to a crisis extending into the intimate, a discourse in 'power' and the singular positions afforded to 'women' insistently slips to reveal multiplicity as its excess.
