In 2022, Liverpool fans changed the political landscape of Europe. They held governments, police forces and billion pound industries to account. They did that. Not Klopp. Not the players. Not the board. Not our government or our MPs. Liverpool fans.
I’m not remotely interested in football, but I will forever admire the power that their honest approach to a dishonest representation created following the 2022 Champions League final in Paris.
Emma Case, working with The Red Archive, just happened to send twenty seven Liverpool fans to that match with twenty seven disposable cameras. In the run up to the match, there are dozens of joyful celebratory images of Liverpool fans making the most of their stay in the city, loudly, chaotically, but respectfully, enjoying the occasion.
As the day went on, fans were directed along unsafe routes to the stadium. Police, security teams, and match officials kept thousands of them in the dark as to why they were in crushed tunnels. Once at the gate, and after the match, legitimate tickets were said to be fraudulent, and as the match was being played, reports emerged with false narratives that directly blamed Liverpool fans for a situation caused entirely by French authorities.
The confusion, anger, and sadness of those fans was later shared with authorities and news channels, sharing a more accurate picture, but one that still took weeks to make the impact it should have made instantly – to hold those responsible to account.
The exhibition and accompanying publication, The Story of Paris, are made up of a mostly joyful series of photographs, but also a string of messages in a group chat between the fans, The Red Archive, and Emma Case, who was viewing this all from her sofa.
The archive presented at Space Liverpool, over the opening weekend of Independents Biennial, was poignant, clean, and well produced, but it was also a meaningful representation of the power of social photography.
It’s not simply about the images, it’s about the teamwork behind them, the coordination. Would it have been as powerful an exhibition without the events of the day? Obviously not. Would it have still been a magnificent piece of social photography? Yes, because the power of this doesn’t come from the events, it comes from the fact that the people who took those images did so for the purpose of sharing a joint experience.
That joint experience is one that will resonate with hundreds of thousands of Liverpool residents who, every weekend, are part of that same community of fans and who, that weekend, were part of the same wrongly demonised group.
The Story of Paris was open for just one weekend, but you can see more ongoing work with The Red Archive on their website, which has become an essential journal for fan history, as well as modern day projects like this.
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Find more on Emma Case and The Red Archive at www.theredarchive.org
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith