Joel Sternfeld’s *Treading On Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa* records the demonstrations that surrounded the G8 summit in Genoa during the third week of July 2001. Published by Steidl in 2003, the book places Sternfeld not in the position of a detached observer, but among demonstrators whose presence and arguments he sought to understand. Its subject is therefore both a historic protest and the political imagination that gathered around it: opposition to globalization, concern for planetary sustainability, and the wider question of what the “anti-global” movement was asking for.

The book’s central method is direct and deliberately close. Sternfeld walked and ran through the streets with protesters, making rapid portraits and recording their comments when circumstances permitted. Those statements accompany the images and give the book its particular register: rather than reducing the demonstration to a mass spectacle, it attends to individuals and to the language through which they explained their participation. The photographs are thus bound to testimony, with the page functioning as a meeting point between face, voice, and public event.

That approach acquires greater gravity as the book reaches the final events in Genoa: the death of protester Carlo Giuliani and the night raid on the Genoa Social Forum, where sleeping protesters were beaten at the Armando Diaz School. Sternfeld’s response was to recognize the urgency of reporting what had happened. The resulting work belongs to the documentary tradition while retaining an artist’s attention to encounter, sequence, and the character of a portrait.

For collectors, this is a significant example of Sternfeld turning his observational practice toward an immediate political crisis. Its value lies in the tension between the quickness of street-level recording and the considered space of the photobook, where individual voices remain alongside images of collective action. At 96 pages, the English-language paperback is a focused record of a decisive moment in early twenty-first-century protest culture, and a revealing departure from approaches that treat political crowds as anonymous scenery.