There is a connection between protests and the desire to record them for posterity. Photographs from the protest sites of Shaheen Bagh and Singhu Border, in 2020 and 2021 respectively, provided a visual narrative that evolved over the course of the protests. It was a spectacle, and the imagery was provided to others, like me, who perceived it primarily through their photographic mediation. This narrative pandered to the spectacle in a universally understood visual language of protests – crowd, posters and other objects symbolic of protests. But there was much more to the two sites as people descended here to use the context to document the event through different lenses giving it various forms, of which I will consider the unidimensional digital photographic form. The photographs from here - their production, dissemination, and the reading became part of a larger collective public effort towards documenting and resisting. These photographs also provided visual feedback that contributed to shaping the protests in some ways. I want to begin with imagining the protest sites as spaces that invite people to record; and the photographer (anyone taking the photograph, really!) armed with the ubiquitous mobile phone camera as the leading figure in this collective effort.There have been iconic photographs of protests that have come to stand in, visually, for the event. However, in the two protests that I mentioned, it is difficult to put a finger on one photograph and consider it as symbolic of the entire protest. This paper will attempt to understand whether the multitude of photographs taken of an event and their instant relay through social media has had a bearing on the iconic photograph from emerging?
