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public through egalitarian means. In such systems, people in key positions are controlled andelected through public consensus processes and all public actions are taken from the publicitself. All the power is distributed among the people and social structuring is based onegalitarianism. In that case, the benefits of implementation of such democratic practice, isthat the public is in control of its own decisions and thus, in my opinion, that is the basicpurpose of democracy in general. An interesting concept of direct democracy is polyarchyby Robert Dahl (Dahl, 1972), in which he proposes a completely egalitarian way ofinvolvement in democratic practices through active criticism and active participation of thepublic. A final basic variant of democracy and the one that I believe is the most relevant inregards with photojournalism that I discuss in this paper is that of participatory democracy.In participatory democracy, public sphere is able to reform and reshape political actions andaffect decisions through participation of the citizens to the societal institutions and actions(Zittel, 2007). In contemporary era, such democratic practice it is said to exist through thenew media and the internet, where people can express openly and freely their opinions and

participate in social actions. An example of these participatory democratic practices can beviewed in the 1999 anti-globalization movement where the people were using the newmedia and the internet to communicate and cooperate and in the more recent movementsof Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement where individual participation via the internetplayed a major role. In such movements, protestors are equal to express their opinions, tocommunicate and to take action in the protest, but in general the whole group is unifiedtowards a common goal (Miller, 2011).

The above photographic image represented in the magnum website(http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZQ5L) is an example of the collective action that constitutes participatory democracy. Thephotographer Christopher Anderson (2011), was capturing the demonstrators arrests during

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZQ5Lhttp://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZQ5Lhttp://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZQ5Lhttp://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZQ5L

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the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York in November 2011. Through this image,the moment he captured the photo, the theme of the photo and through the photographiclanguage of this picture (Barthes, 1977), the photographer is embedding a personalmeaning, an opinion, a question that wants to be expressed publicly. Through the image heis participating in social actions, because through his embedded message in thephotographic medium is trying to provoke and evoke social action. Moreover, as Lewis Hinepreviously did with his labor photography he is criticizing a social condition (Sampsell-Willmann, 2009), an element necessary to participatory democracy (Held, 2006). Morespecifically the above photographic image I believe is aligned to the Occupy Movementsideals of social and economic equality and expresses these concerns by provoking us to takeaction against social and economic inequality. In the above image we can see that policearrests protestors (the 99% in their slogan) that are protesting peacefully against economicinequality, instead of the Wall Street bankers and economically wealth (the 1%) that areresponsible for that inequality. This could be seen as a social discrimination, that the police

force for example is being used against the protestors in favor of the economically wealthy.This message embedded in the image could be perceived not only as a reference to theparticular event (protestors in New York) but also as a universal message against economicand social inequality that is experienced in the Western World. So the photographer throughthe photographic medium is calling us to participate and take action in social events in orderto reshape the social order another element of Participatory Democracy (Zittel, 2007).

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Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1977). Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The Decisive Moment. New York: Henri Cartier Bresson- Verveand Simon and Schuster.

Dahl, R. (1972). Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press.

Held, D. (2006). Models of Democracy. Cambridge : Polity Press.

Miller, J. (2011, 10 25). The New York Times . Retrieved 10 21, 2013, from Will ExtremistsHijack Occupy Wall Street?: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/opinion/will-extremists-hijack-occupy-wall-street.html?_r=0

Moholy-Nagy, L. (1967). Malerei, Fotografie, Film. Mainz: Florian Kupferberg Verlag.

Sampsell-Willmann, K. (2009). Lewis Hine as Social Critic. Univesity Press of Mississippi.

Schumpeter, A. J. (2003). Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy. Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Zittel, T. (2007). Participatory democracy and political participation. In T. Zittel, & D. Fuchs,Participatory democracy and political participation: Can participatory engineering bringcitizens back in? (pp. 9-29). New York : Routledge.