Abstract
From May 68 posters to republican murals in Belfast, from Paul Pieter Piech’s anti-apartheid pictures to SOS Racisme badge, iconography seems to be strongly related to social protest. Could we imagine a political demonstration without any graphic manifesto? Although omnipresent, protest pictures did not get many attention from social scientists until now. This article aims at underlying the interest of an iconographical approach of social protest and at exposing its epistemolocial and methodological groundings. Firstly, I question the lack of interest for iconography in the studies in social mobilizations. Secondly, I establish the conditions in which protest pictures can be considered as a legitimate object to study social movements. Eventually, I try to show how analyzing pictures can improve our knowledge of protest movements.