Since its inception, photography has captured defining historical moments, serving as either a tool or a document of protest.Flashpoint!explores the diverse roles and varying aesthetics that photography in print undertakes in its support of protest and resistance.Ruder Plakatand a custom version of Luca Pellegrini’sElectawere used throughout the book. Ruder Plakat, based onEmil Ruder’s poster typewhich was developed with students at Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel (AGS), served as the perfect display font for a project about civil resistance. Electa, in turn, was used for all body text as well as meta data, captions and references. Being the result of Luca’s obsessive study of an Olivetti typewriter, its historic charm with strict sophistication performed in pretty much every setting we put it in. The book was edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich and published by10×10 Photobooks: Flashpoint!, an anthology focusing on protest photography in print, presents a global selection of photobooks, zines, posters, pamphlets, independent journals and alternative newspapers that address protest and resistance from the 1950s to the present.
This typography system embodies urgent intellectual activism — the kind of focused intensity found in university protest movements and underground publishing. The pairing communicates scholarly rigor meeting grassroots resistance, with Ruder Plakat's bold geometric authority commanding attention while Electa's typewriter heritage evokes the immediacy of manifestos and underground journalism.
Ruder Plakat's connection to Emil Ruder's Basel school makes it typographically authentic for a project about civil resistance — its geometric construction and poster origins carry inherent political gravitas. Electa's typewriter DNA provides perfect contextual resonance for protest documentation, while its refined proportions and consistent spacing ensure excellent readability across body text, captions, and metadata without sacrificing the raw authenticity that monospaced forms suggest.
The pairing creates compelling tension between institutional authority (Ruder Plakat's Swiss modernist heritage) and grassroots documentation (Electa's typewriter character). This hierarchy mirrors the book's subject matter — the formal academic study of informal protest movements — while the fonts' shared European design lineage prevents stylistic discord despite their functional opposition.