The Paris Commune: signs of a polyclassist photographic consciousness

Abstract

This article considers a series of photographs taken during the Paris Commune, which it postulates constitute the emergence of a photographic social consciousness in the context of the formation of a revolutionary social force. To this end, we investigate the background -the photographs taken during the insurrection of June 1848- and the shots taken during 1870, in the context of the Franco-Prussian war. It analyses the role played by a group of photographers who had been commercially active since at least the 1850s and their participation in the events of 1871, and then examines a series of photographs produced during the Commune. The hypothesis proposed is that, as a photographic expression of social conflict, they constitute an important precedent in relation to the emergence of proletarian photography in the 1920s, and invite us to extend the concept of class struggle to the field of the image