- RADU STERN
- Dialogue 1, The image and the reality | 28.02.08 | 11.08
A period of idolatry
More than ten years ago now I asked the students at the school of applied arts in Vevey to count the number of images that they saw on their way from the school to the station, a five-minute walk away. The average was approximately 50 images, in an only moderately commercial part of a small town. How many images would they have seen in a big city?
In my opinion, the battle with images is not looming in front of us, we are right in the middle of it, if not already in the process of losing it. It is not just the physical proliferation of the images that constitute the iconosphere, but also the enormous extension of the limits of what it is possible -and desirable- to show. We need only compare Roger Fenton’s images of war with the famous image of the severed hand photographed by Todd Maisel on September 11 to see how far we have travelled. Images have infiltrated everywhere, and no space, not even the most intimate, is entirely safe from them. For quite a number of years now the emancipation of the adolescent has ritually commenced with a freely consented invasion of the universe of their childhood bedroom by images of singers, film stars and rappers. The theologians at the Council of Nicaea in 787 drew a distinction between proskynesis, the reverence that believers could show to religious images and latria, the adoration that was reserved for God. Today, this distinction no longer holds, and images of all kinds, from those of Che Guevara to those of Angelina Jolie, are adored by their respective devotees.
Are we at the beginning of a period of idolatry?
5 de March del 2008 a les 20:57
From my point of view, the period of idolatry evolves/transcendes to a period of self-idolatry, giving all the slef-portraits published on-line by the new emerging generation, by means like myspace-hi5-blogger-flickr and all resembling self-promoting public websites. So, not only that the imange/photograph is part of the daily surrounding, in an external way, so-to-say, but it becomes a habbit, a mean of communication, and, nevertheless, a moral boost, a confident giver, a “show-offy”, “turn-ony” cheap mobile of grabbing some attention and dilating the ego.
The image is more and more accessible, less and less sacred, has no longer that aura that Walter Benjamin was speaking about, photography is not even plausible anymore, the process starting with a capture and reaching a final point in a poster/an add/a documentary image passes through too many stages to come out “clean”, it’s purity is deflowerd from the first touch of “Image/Adjustments/levels”