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Following The Woman with the Handbag: Mnemonic Context Collapse and the Anti-fascist Activist Appropriation of an Iconic Historical Photograph

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Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

Abstract

This chapter follows a single iconic historical protest photograph across time, media and space, and traces and tracks its recent appropriation and mobilisation by different anti-fascist activists and social movements. The photograph, known as The Woman with the Handbag, shows a woman striking a neo-Nazi Nordic Reich Party member with her handbag. After outlining the relationship between photographs and memory in the age of digital reproduction and the methodology used to follow the photograph, the chapter discusses the photograph’s circulation before exploring what has happened to the cultural memories that it indexes as it has diffused digitally and been appropriated in different anti-fascist activist contexts. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the dangers of the collapsed historical and biographical contexts that can result from a photograph’s digital diffusion and activist appropriation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Methodological inspiration was also taken from scholars who have followed the digital spread of contemporary photographs in other empirical settings (see Horsti, 2017; Peck, 2014; Reading, 2011a).

  2. 2.

    Knowing when to stop following the photograph proved difficult and was at least partially dictated by publication schedules. I continue to follow the photograph, albeit in a less motivated and systematic manner.

  3. 3.

    Of course some of these encounters were at least partially influenced by the algorithms that determine what content is served up to social media users by each platform based on their previous activities.

  4. 4.

    Another way by which the photograph travelled that suggests its limited press circulation in the USA.

  5. 5.

    It should be noted that the algorithms used by Google and Google Images certainly bias these results and that, given how such algorithms personalise results and are regularly changed, these exact results are unlikely to be wholly replicable. They can thus only be considered indicative rather than totally representative of the photograph’s status on the internet. Repeated search exercises have, however, confirmed the general patterns that they convey.

  6. 6.

    Only 14 other languages were represented in the results until the end of 2017, demonstrating the photographs continued spread. The 24 languages included, in order of prevalence: Polish (6), Spanish (6), Greek (6), German (5), Portuguese (5), Russian (5), Chinese (5), Italian (4), Croatian (3), Persian (3), Korean (3), Indonesian (2), Slovakian (2), Thai (2), Taiwanese (2), Filipino (1), Danish (1), Slovenian (1), Hindu (1), Romanian (1), Albanian (1), Nepalese (1), Arabic (1), Finnish (1).

  7. 7.

    Here the photograph found an afterlife on a platform suited for explicit political communication unhindered by the conventions of neutrality fostered by Wikipedia: protest stickers.

  8. 8.

    They have since used the photograph on other forms of merchandising.

  9. 9.

    There are many further examples of this, including the use of the photograph as a cover image on the Brazilian Platforma Antifascista Community Facebook page (see https://www.facebook.com/AntifascistaBrasil/)

  10. 10.

    These results are influenced by the changes made to the Twitter platform in late 2013, which meant images showed automatically and no longer needed users to click on image links. They also revealed earlier digital echoes of the photograph persisting in misfunctioning hyperlinks to Tumblr, Reddit and Pinterest, suggesting these platforms’ influence during earlier phases of the photograph’s digital diffusion. Finally, they suggest that on this platform Danielsson is more often associated with the photograph than Runesson and that the photographer’s association with the image may be waning.

  11. 11.

    On 21 January 2019, this tweet had 24,924 retweets and 39,460 likes.

  12. 12.

    As of 21 January, 2019. One tweet shows the photograph and caption on a protest placard, and elsewhere they have been printed together on postcard, indexing again the photograph’s transductive mobilisation.

  13. 13.

    See: https://www.reddit.com/r/photoshopbattles/comments/41dcxa/psbattle_old_lady_swinging_her_purse_at_nazis/?sort=new (Accessed 21 January 2019).

  14. 14.

    Another example is the use of a red silhouette of Danielsson in the style of the famous anti-nuclear Smiling Sun as a logo by a Swedish Facebook community page that opposes the Sweden Democrats—the country’s far-right populist party.

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  1. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Samuel Merrill

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  1. Samuel Merrill
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  1. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Samuel Merrill

  2. Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Emily Keightley

  3. Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Priska Daphi

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Merrill, S. (2020). Following The Woman with the Handbag: Mnemonic Context Collapse and the Anti-fascist Activist Appropriation of an Iconic Historical Photograph. In: Merrill, S., Keightley, E., Daphi, P. (eds) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_5

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