The ubiquity of the image

I don’t so much want to try to answer the questions Christian asks himself -and us- as to say something about his tone. It troubles me to find him withdrawn, dejected, pessimistic… We’ve know each other for a long time: if I’m not mistaken, since he came to Barcelona in 1978 to present the exhibition by Bernard Faucon in the Fotomania gallery. For thirty years, then, what he has done and what he has said have always struck me as very much to the point. So I am afraid that he is not a pessimist but a well-informed realist. At the same time, though, I still want to believe that we have options open to us. I may be naive, but I’m committed to possibilist optimism. I’m not, of course, advocating terrorist action, but perhaps the guerrilla tactics proposed by Radu, or at least sniper tactics. You’re right, Christian, to say that a sniper doesn’t win a war, but the sniper’s effort is useful in making resistance visible and inflicting a symbolic blow on the enemy. And -to swap the cumbersome military metaphors for the terminology of medicine- the work of the artist can function as a vaccine, inoculating an organism with debilitated strains of a virus in order to trigger the production of antibodies. The vaccine may or may not work, and even if it does work it may take some time to produce appreciable results, but at least, as Sancho Panza says at one point to Quixote, ‘Let them not take from us the glory of the attempt.’ [Incidentally, I have this quote fresh in my mind because it has been chosen by Mariona Fernández, director of SCAN, to support the convening of this new event.]

In other words, there are images that transform lives, and images that can even change the course of history. If not, why would governments and the military censor the free work of photojournalists? Photography has always questioned itself about its capacity to impinge on reality. I remember an observation of Bertolt Brecht’s to the effect that photography could show us the façades of the Krupp factories without telling us anything about the conditions of exploitation that existed inside them, the interpretation being that photography doesn’t fall within the discourse of important things. Meanwhile, however, Heartfield and Renau were rousing the spirit of the masses with their photomontages, and groups such as the Arbeiter Fotografie in Germany and the Photo League in the United States were producing documentary photography in the service of the workers’ struggle. These and others initiatives have not put an end to the injustices of capitalism; I don’t even know if they have helped make a better world (if you’ll pardon the expression), but they do constitute actions from the realm of photography that are not sterile.

And so, in effect, the situation has changed radically, and we end up asking ourselves: what should be done now? I place my confidence in two things. On the one hand, the creativity and tenacity of the photographers. However tough conditions get, there will always find the ingenuity to come up with responses. And on the other hand, the role of the Internet and the new technologies in allowing decentralized interpersonal communication. However restrictive the control exercised by the system may be, there will always be ways of escaping it and constructing alternatives.

Etiquetes: resistance

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