The ubiquity of the image

Joan is right when he says that my tone is pessimistic… Maybe it’s the time, which is not very funny, either politically or in terms of view of global economic or aesthetic movements and the dominance of the market, rampant mediocrity, consumption replacing knowledge and communication ousting information that go with it.

I’m glad he feels that in the realm of the image in the last thirty years I have actually achieved a certain number of acts, appearances, disruptions of the routine that is imposing itself. All of this is in parallel, to some extent, with what Joan has produced as an artist. There has been, right from the start, a resistance to the norms for fixing the play of images and their appropriation by the viewer. Thirty years is rather a long time, and I still find it hard to understand the editors of prestigious magazines, who don’t even want to pay what it costs to produce an images, who say to us: ‘It’s great, but it’s not for our readers,’ and go on to add: ‘Our readers wouldn’t understand!’

But I am optimistic! The proof is that I write a column every week and publish the occasional portfolio in Internazionale in Italy. And that I ‘publish’ on the Internet (http://www.actuphoto.com/) an unlikely dialogue and daily journal with the Chinese photographer Aniu, who sends me a self-portrait every day to which I respond with a text. And that I’m taking part in the present dialogue. And that I still teach bright young people, give lectures, put on exhibitions and organize books.

I am optimistic because I continue to do things, to shake up ideas and images, to write in order to try to think what is happening to us in this maelstrom of ‘visuals’ that is all around us.

I am not a creator of images, just a ‘middleman’ between those who make them and those who receive them. My only real reason for being optimistic comes from seeing that a lot of young people today still have a desire to work through photography with the state of the world in which they live. Not only do they offer me new discoveries, they also manifest a desire to change the world, while being fully aware that photography can’t do it on its own.

They are a proposition for the future, both when they document -take a look at the exemplary latest works by the three World Press Photo prize-winners from the VU agency at http://www.agencevu.com/, and those of others who didn’t win a prize, like Steeve Junker or Kosuke- and when artists use the image -as Joan does, for example- to take a stand on global issues. Terrorism, for example. Impertinence and derision are as much to the point as investigative journalism.

These are the people, the creators in different modalities, who oblige me to be optimistic!

It doesn’t really matter that their distribution is limited, that it can’t compare with the giants of the transmission. It may not be so important.

We are left with two basic questions: how can we introduce an education in the reading of images from the early years of schooling on, and what are we capable of inventing, on the Internet, to resist the dominant imagery?

A guerrilla, even if he or she is wrong, is of necessity an optimist. And I see myself, more than ever, as a guerrilla…

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.