If images truly possess a power, one ought to ask what that power could possibly be, given that for the second consecutive year the world’s most famous photography jury has crowned a shot bearing witness to the perpetuation of a massacre that seems impervious to all the images it generates.
I already wrote about the misgivings aroused in me by Mohammed Salem’s photograph — the one that was christened the “Pietà of Gaza”; I feel those same misgivings before this new image.
But rather than speaking of the risk of the message being drained of vitality through an aestheticisation that by now spares not even the most acute suffering, this time I might begin with the reaction of an online user, picked up by a website on which this image was analysed1. At the end of the article, the author praises a parallel that one of her contacts drew between the portrait of little Mahmoud and the Venus de Milo.
Personally, even setting aside all the drawing-room qualifications the article records, I find the comparison so aberrant that I do not think it worth commenting on.
What interests me, however, is the iconological fury that this parallel betrays: images — photographic ones included — now seem to have lost any reference to reality whatsoever; their referents are other images, in a web of continuous cross-references that appear incapable of piercing the iconospheres in which we now live cocooned, and which seem to have genuinely become the most solid reality we are able to perceive.
Perhaps it is for this reason that photographs — even those belonging to the rawest reportage — end up replicating things already seen and defusing the impact of the most tragic situations; perhaps there is no other way to penetrate the visual carapace that has grown up around us. But the purpose of true documentary photography ought to be to break through armour, not to remain itself caught in a web of stock images.
And I do not believe these images possess that power..
The photographs and images on this page, in compliance with copyright law, are reproduced for purposes of criticism and discussion pursuant to Articles 65, paragraph 2; 70, paragraph 1-bis; and 101, paragraph 1 of Law 633/1941.
English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.
- I owe the reference to Ivano Ancinelli, whom I thank[↩]