According to Roland Barthes, a photograph is an indication that we are dying, it is a register, a mirror that reminds us of this fact common to all of us: we are going to die. As he argues in the book Camera Lucida, the photograph tells us death in the future (p. 96).
If a photograph carries this sentence of death in the future, so what does the photo of dead body represent? It is the concretization of a prediction? Or that we are already dead? If so, what is the purpose of depicting death?
Does it make us kill less? Does it make us feel sympathetic? As Benjamin argues, reception in the age of mechanical reproduction, turns the public into an examiner, but an absent minded-one. He goes on to state that all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war (p. 241).
The way that we receive images of violence from mainstream media, the amount of images that put you in contact with death, make you not feel, you just absorb the images without connection to the body that is representing death. Death becomes nothing; the violence becomes nothing and the uncanny presence of the body without life, predicting about our future does not move us.
This constant reminder of what we as human beings are able to do to other human beings lost its power in the process of mechanical reproduction. Death is manipulated by media in a way that death itself becomes a commodity. It is sold to us with the illusion that death is a fate to the other, that for us, death is not present, that we are immune to it.
Instead of creating a sense of urgency or proximity in the viewer, these images (especially when they depict people in a distant place, with a visibly different culture) allow viewers to see the suffering as something other, something distant, something unrelated to their own ordinary reality. Thus, viewers feel no sense of guilt, no responsibility, and no demands. In this sense, death becomes exotic for this illusion that it is present only for the other.
Diane Eck has analyzed, about the ways in which photography has become a way of defining, appropriating and recycling reality. She argues in her book Darsan that the image business has become an important part of modern consumerism and has turned all of us into the creators and consumers of images (p. 13, 14).
Psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman (1997), in his book Social Suffering argues that as infotainment () images of victims are commercialized; they are taken up into process of global marketing and business competition (p. 1). Audiences tend to just absorb and accept what is delivered. Thus, they become consumers of the suffering of others. As entertainment, violence distracts the viewer. Instead of stimulating critical thoughts, the images of death become attractions to be delivered at the prime-time TV news to right after be replaced by advertisements.
If photographs tend to register a moment of our life, where a family album can be seen as a memorial experience, and can give us the chance of determining and designing how our photographs will be displayed and seen, therefore how our history will be registered, I kept imagining if one would include the photograph of a dead relative or parent who was killed because of war. What would one says? This is my son in the day he died?
Finally, this commercialization of death, of the body that does not have more life and the consumerism of these images that do not have a name, a past, any clue that could remind us of the life that the body once had, does not consider the real facts that resulted on the death of a person, which are forgotten in the process of commercialization of the image. In this sense, what we see is history being distorted and becoming a commodity that is sold for the pleasure of seeing suffers of the others.
References
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York : Hill and Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations. New York : Schocken Books, c1969.
Eck, Diana L. Darsan, Seeing the Divine Image in India . [Chambersburg, Pa.] : Anima Books, 1981.
Kleinman, Arthur. Introduction. Social Suffering. Ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997
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Philosophy of Imageby philosophy112,091 views
Assassino !
randomTVshowRus 4 months ago
who are these tiny ASSASINERS
narcovice 1 year ago