” The shocking images of people jumping from the Twin Towers have had a profound effect on our collective memory. At the same time, they are the target of ongoing strategies of repression with equal but opposite urgency” (M. Carbone, L’evento dell’ Setup , p. )
The Falling Man depicted in his aesthetic perfection and tangible horror, the infamous September, th The photo is an image that better sums up the tragedy of that day, which has become a part of history A true watershed moment. However, it became the direct target of a ferocious censorship campaign, so much so that Juno wrote on Esquire: “In the US, it was painstakingly removed from the September records th”. “Something extreme and transcendent makes this imagery against our mental reference system and does so to such an extent that it looks unbearable that it needs to be removed. It doesn’t just mean being buried under the rug, but is evicted and almost “quarantined” to prevent it from reappearing. This makes it invisible twice; first by being hidden, and second by potential events that prevent it from reappearing (cf: Mauro Carbone, L’evento dell’ Settings
. Quando iniziò il XXI secolo, Mimesis, Milan, 350).
) 2-year-old Alan Kurdi was caught on the beach Images of bodies washed up and drowned have different fates, but similar outcomes.
became the target of insatiable media overexposure, with the effect of rapidly desensitizing our gaze, that pic The photo lost most of its powerful impact and somehow became almost perfect due to the excess media coverage I couldn’t see at all.
This does not mean that the image has lost its impact power or its traumatic nature, but it now requires our anaesthetic Gaze detours for a long time to be affected by it. As if we need to put in extra effort to get a real emotional experience of that image.
Desensitization is another form of suppression after all. Obviously, overexposure and masking represent just two options that can change the power of a photo by taking it off. However, there is a more dangerous one. In fact, we can always try to fight against desensitization, especially censorship, but trying to resist what affects our contemporary aesthetic and emotional relationship with the world—the interweaving between surrealism and non-realism—is more challenging sex. In other words, we have become accustomed to the fictional surrealism of virtual images, against which the power of reality may dissipate and the possibility of establishing a difference between reality and fiction is in jeopardy. The violence-derived collective consciousness that dominates contemporary blockbuster cinema is a current and self-evident example. It’s also clear that the violence depicted in action movies and video games doesn’t match reality. No creature survives — even for a few minutes — the ordeal our modern heroes endure in action movies. However, despite its fictional violence, it is portrayed in a highly surreal way with devastating consequences – there is a possibility, if not inevitable, that a documentary of the Ukraine war could be seen as a film or film to process. Electronic games.
When watching a Russian tank run over by two elderly Ukrainian civilians, or watching a war drone crash into Russian military vehicles and posts Are we really conditioned, even just aesthetically or interpretatively, to discern this reality we are witnessing when it comes to video? Are we conditioned to rationally view the events depicted as having real consequences, including death, the smell of burning human flesh, and dismembered corpses? There is an ontological confusion, which affects the cognition of Westerners. Illusion becomes reality, and reality becomes blurred by fiction. Violence prevails as an aesthetic norm, and it is increasingly difficult to acknowledge it in reality (ie: “what I see, I watch like a movie”). Fiction acquires the real, tangible quality of hallucination, while reality somehow becomes a dreamlike dimension. After all, the World Trade Center attack has been “staged” and announced by so many Hollywood blockbusters that, when it did happen, it was not only a traumatic historical event, but also represented a fictitious and horrific dimension invading our society Reality (See: S. Zizek, Welcome to the Real Desert: Five Essays for September and related dates, Verso, London-New York, 66).
In all In three cases—inhibition, desensitization, and ontological confusion—the political and moral power of the image is compromised and neutralized. Yet another sign, perhaps decisive, of the depoliticization of contemporary Western culture, which seems to require politics to be governed in such a way as to not hold individuals critically accountable—hence populism and its politically subversive and authoritarian nature — and the effort to make conscious and informed choices is at the heart of building civic education and the ideal of democratic citizenship. If anything, the depoliticization of our society has produced a world hypersensitive to confrontation, hypersensitive to the widespread conflict that undermines it, and expecting life to be managed according to the same like/dislike logic that governs social media.
Having said that, a conscience about visual culture, about regaining political power and moral efficacy, is becoming a crucial and necessary battle. This is because images reach a level that no reasoning or speech can easily do. Images have the power to change the way we see things, and for that, they don’t even need to accompany words or be an embellishment to the information they serve only to illustrate. Their power is not that they refer to a deeper meaning, which does matter. Quite the contrary, their power lies in the fact that images do not need to be containers for conveying information, just as words refer to their meanings. Images are messages—by their very nature, they are performative, efficacious, and have the power to function without anything else. They are able to provoke and trigger events and shifts in any direction (revolutionary or disruptive, innovative or restorative) without any kind of contemplative processing.
Most Popular
Photography Fashion
PhotoVogues Global Open C All• The Next Great Fashion Image Producer• Jury
go through Francesca Malani
2021
9263
They can bypass the moment of deliberation and its temporality, and for this reason their impact is faster and probably also shorter, which does not Doesn’t mean there aren’t a lasting sequence of disadvantages. But that’s a different story. For all of the above reasons, anything to do with visual culture cannot but be a moral issue. First, in relation to our customs, accepting mores in Latin; means it can change and change them, inspire dreams or cause politics , a social and cultural nightmare. Still other invocations are about taking responsibility and subjectivizing its impact, so that they are no longer just a (sometimes dangerous) suggestion, but transformed into critical awareness.
This isCourse version of PhotoVogue developed by Alessia Glaviano, which is also the path the PhotoVogue Festival took a long time ago.
Its desire has always been to restore the image to its morality and politics due to the rediscovery of the multitude of images that surround us with the experience of inhabiting these images The capabilities and ambitions at the heart of the fiery reality of the world, thus triggering potential changes affecting our contemporary sensitivities and customs. Whether it’s something we love or fear.
Separating Scylla from the path of political correctness – being able to turn political action into compliance with no consequences – and the harsh reality The epoch-making and subjective resistance of Charybdis is narrow, but do we really have a choice?
