The ubiquity of the image

In order to respond to Christian’s request, let’s clarify a few points. I’d like to qualify his assertion that it all depends on the dissemination of images, not on their nature. Without denying the importance of transmission, it seems to me that the nature is crucial. I said in an earlier message that the really subversive images are the ones that are not content simply to represent things, but call into question the status of the image and the nature of representation. These are the images that have the ability to lay bare the functioning of the world of images.

Christian is right when he says that the battle is unequal. Statistically, these images are not even a drop in the ocean of visual banality. However, the power of these images should not be engaged in a frontal attack against a very much larger number of enervating images: their impact is much stronger when their action is based on guerrilla tactics. In such an approach, numerical inferiority can be offset by the force and daring of the blow. One of the best examples is the famous book Sputnik by our friend Joan, a real hammer blow to the credulous acceptance of the veracity of images. The best results are obtained by way of the old Trotskyist strategy of entryism, first infiltrating the system the better to destroy it from within. Joan did this using the distribution channels of publishing, the museum or television while dismantling their mechanisms, and it’s what Matthias Bruggmann has done by publishing his photos in a recent issue of Time magazine. It’s slipping through the gaps in the system that works best.

Even so, this strategy of trying to subvert the world of images from the inside will never succeed unless it is accompanied by a genuine education in images from an early age: something that, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t exist anywhere at the moment.

Etiquetes: critique, education, system, transmission

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