Tiananmen Square, China, 1989
In response to a carte blanche invitation by Amnesty International, MYOP presents an iconography of demonstrations around the world. An exhibition like a collective roar, reminding us that demonstrating is a right that protects all others. Manifesto: Amnesty International x MYOP is at Arles festival of photography until 27 August 2023. All images: MYOP agency
Photograph: Alain Keler
Actions against the loi sécurité globale and for the defence of social rights, France, 2020
Demonstrations for the right to information, against police violence, for the freedom to demonstrate and against mass surveillance - in this image a group of demonstrators prepare placards
Photograph: Stéphane Lagoutte
Tear gas in the Lemba district, DRC, 2016
Protests for the end of Joseph Kabila’s mandate, According to the UN, at least 40 people died in the city of Kinshasa during these demonstrations
Photograph: Guillaume Binet
Shanty town in the Calais ‘Jungle’, France, 2016
Demonstration by Ethiopian exiles in support of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The photographer uses the figure of the bird to question the symbolic representations at work among migrant populations. Here, the cross-cultural dimension of the bird acts as a key to understanding the daily lives of the inhabitants of the Calais ‘jungle’ slum in 2015-2016. Evoking exile, flight, freedom, the journey and elsewhere, it reminds us of the extent to which their uprooting is a form of commitment
Photograph: Jean Larive
Sign against Russian influence in government, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2018
A demonstration outside the parliament after attempts to intimidate leading nightlife venues by Georgian law enforcement, who take a dim view of advances in LGBTQ+ rights
Photograph: Julien Pebrel
Valérie Bacot, Paris, France, 2021 (‘They were only a few’ collective)
Bacot shot and killed her husband Daniel Polette on 13 March, 2016. She had suffered 24 years of physical and psychological abuse and rape, and had been forced into prostitution by him. She was sentenced to four years imprisonment on 25 June, 2021, shortly after this portrait was made
Photograph: Ed Alcock
Artem, Kherson, Ukraine, 2022
Artem, 26, was arrested on 1 May 2022 by Russian occupying forces and tortured for days in a detention cell on suspicion of collaborating with the Ukrainian army. Today, Artem’s worried look and fearful face express the horrors he has been through, while he tells his story, to denounce what he and hundreds of other Ukrainian men and women have experienced during the occupation
Photograph: Chloé Sharrock
Ndella Paye , Paris, France, 2015
Paye campaigns against Islamophobia. She denounces the constant attempts to weaken solidarity, following any criminal act committed by a Muslim, deplores the fact that ordinary citizens take the liberty of questioning Muslims in the street to teach them lessons, and fears that this will exclude Muslims from the national community. ‘When I fight, I forbid myself despair,’ she says
Photograph: France Keyser
Mikhail Gorbachev, Marseille, France, 2012
The last leader of the Soviet Union was responsible for the liberation of the Eastern Bloc, making the fall of the Berlin Wall possible. A controversial reformer in Russia, but revered in the west, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1990 for his peacemaking role at the end of the cold war, and his commitment to reducing Russia’s nuclear arsenal
Photograph: Olivier Monge
Angela Davis, Toulouse, France, 2013
Davis, the American activist and philosopher who has focused on topics such as freedom, Marxism, and the intersection between race and gender. She has been associated with the Black Panther Party as well as with the Occupy movement. Davis is photographed here at the presentation of Shola Lynch’s documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners in Toulouse. ‘It’s not my life that’s important,’ she says, ‘but the fact that a fight on a planetary scale gave me freedom. If we could win this way, without the internet, then today we can change the world’
Photograph: Ulrich Lebeuf
Kadikoy, Istanbul, 2022
A gathering organised by far-left groups and the families of the victims of the Ankara attack in October 2015. Carried out by a suicide bomber, it killed 109 people. There were many victims, as the attack took place during a protest again President Erdoğan. The demonstrators accused him of having deliberately left gaps in the security of the gathering in order to leave the demonstrators exposed to such attacks as a means of punishment
Photograph: Julien Daniel
Pussay, France, 20 January 2022
Florent Sebban harvests leeks on his farm. He is one of a new breed of French farmers who are concerned about the environment and health, and who are taking a stand against a global market fuelled by imports and exports of poor-quality, standardised foodstuffs
Photograph: Olivier Laban-Mattei
Nanda’s wedding, Dadeldhura, Nepal, 2013
Nanda marries Birendra before the whole village. As with most Nepalese women, hers was an arranged marriage. It is impossible to know her age accurately: she is either 17 or 23, depending on who you ask. Although marriage before the age of 18 is banned in Nepal, the majority of women in rural areas marry in adolescence, or even as children. At the end of the ceremony, a mock abduction is organised and the bride is carried off on men’s backs, across the mountains
Photograph: Marie Dorigny
Anne - Bangui, Central African Republic, 2020
Anne (not her real name), 18, lived at her aunt’s house until her uncle raped her. A week later, she urinated blood and her older sister took her to the community hospital. It was too late for the morning-after pill. Three months later, she still worries that she is HIV positive. Her father, blaming her for the rape, stopped paying for her studies, forcing Anne to drop out. ‘I think about going back to school, so I can become somebody tomorrow and show my father that I’m a woman. I am not a delinquent and one day I will be somebody in this country’
Photograph: Adrienne Surprenant
Clessé (71260), 2002
Emma, 13, was killed by dozens of stab wounds inflicted by her 14-year-old boyfriend. The places where women in this series died are simple and ordinary. Whether landscapes or interiors, the deliberate emptiness left at the centre of the frame refers to the disappearance of each victim, to their absence, to a silence
Photograph: Zen Lefort
Loup et chevreuils, Savoie, France, 2022
Diverted from their hunting purpose, the photographic traps used here are passive sensors left for months in the wind, snow and night. In this project, the photographers combine their subjectivity with that of other animals. By entrusting the act of triggering the shutter to the movement - whether of living creatures or of the elements – a tiny work of art emerges from the environment itself, implicitly a protest against human violence to the natural world
Photograph: Michel Slomka
English (US)