Photo credit: Shutterstock
Article by Christina Vaughan, 29th October 2026
A man kneels on the edge of an American Football field.
The gesture is quiet. The response is anything but.
It has been ten years since Colin Kaepernick first took the knee during the American national anthem to protest against racial injustice and police brutality. Photographs of that act retain an extraordinary power. They have become part of the visual language of protest, recognised by people who may never have watched him play.
In his recent interview with BBC Sport, Kaepernick says he understood that his protest could cost him his career. Asked to reflect on his decision a decade later, his answer is unequivocal: “I would absolutely do it again.”
I find that profoundly moving.
Having spent more than thirty years working in the business of images, I am interested in how a photograph becomes iconic. Kaepernick’s story also demands that we consider what becoming an icon costs the person photographed.
We can celebrate the power of an image while paying too little attention to the life that continues outside its frame.
Kaepernick, who had led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl, never found another NFL team after leaving the club in 2017. He believes his protest led to his exclusion. His grievance alleging collusion by team owners ended in a financial settlement in 2019.
His gesture travelled around the world. His playing career did not continue with it.
That is a difficult imbalance to sit with.
Photographs allow an act to reach far beyond the people who witness it. They preserve it, carry it across borders and make it available to others seeking a way to express their own convictions. Kaepernick’s protest helped give athletes elsewhere a gesture through which to communicate opposition to racism, including many footballers here in England.
But that reach also exposes the person pictured to interpretations they cannot control.
Kaepernick explained that he was protesting against racial injustice and police brutality. Critics, including Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, interpreted his action as disrespect towards the United States flag, the anthem and the US military. The same visible gesture became the focus of radically different accounts of his intentions.
A photograph records what someone does. Understanding why requires us to listen.
This is one reason I believe the relationship between images and words matters so much. It is something Stephen Mayes articulates particularly well in our podcast, The Image Makers. A caption, a headline or an editorial decision can help us understand a photograph. It can also steer us away from what its subject was trying to communicate.
Those of us who commission, create, license and publish images have a responsibility here. Context is part of the work.
There is another uncomfortable question in Kaepernick’s story: what do we expect from the people we make visible?
Sport depends on personality, emotion, loyalty and identification. We invite athletes into our lives, celebrate their determination and ask them to inspire us and our children. When they use that influence to challenge something beyond the playing field, their right to speak suddenly becomes contested.
As a football supporter, I understand how much people value the escape a match can offer. I also struggle with the expectation that an athlete should leave their experiences and convictions outside the stadium.
The person wearing the shirt has a life beyond it.
These are precisely the kinds of questions that draw me to the conversations we have on The Image Makers, the podcast I co-host with Stephen Mayes and Heather Stewart-Whyte. Our working lives have given us different perspectives on images: being photographed, creating and interpreting photographs, and bringing imagery to audiences around the world.
Across those perspectives runs a shared interest in what happens when a human being becomes a public image. Who shapes its meaning? What does the audience bring to it? And how much of the person do we overlook once we believe we know what they represent? This is as true of a supermodel as it is of a sports star.
That concern also runs through our work at Cultura Creative.
Our project with Getty Images photographing women in STEM and industry addresses another aspect of visibility: whose expertise we recognise, and whom we can imagine occupying particular roles.
The circumstances are very different from Kaepernick’s protest. The connection is the responsibility involved in showing people to the world. We make choices about who appears, how they are represented and what audiences are invited to understand about them.
Those choices accumulate. They help shape our expectations of authority, belonging and possibility.
Kaepernick’s image asks something further of us. Visibility can bring recognition and solidarity, but it can also bring hostility and personal loss. Being seen is no guarantee of being heard fairly.
Ten years on, we should be able to look at those photographs and see both the reach of his protest and the consequences he describes.
We should also resist treating an iconic image as a finished piece of history. Its familiarity can make us comfortable. We recognise the gesture, remember the controversy and move on, without asking what happened to the injustice that prompted it.
The photograph endures. So does the question Kaepernick put before his audience.
When we look at him taking the knee, are we still listening to what he was asking us to see?
Christina Vaughan
Cultura Creative Founder and co-host of The Image Makers
8th October