Rubble Image
Rubble Image
What do these pictures do with us?
These images can shock us. But they don’t help us much to understand. These photos frame our understanding of war.
By framing, they exclude. They can represent the results of destruction but cannot articulate its causes.
Are we merely voyeurs?
The Syrian war has being covered in real time by cell phones, twitter feeds, maps that remind games. But all these materials have been spread through internet without historical context.
The lack of context and the massive exposure increased by the digital era make the reality becomes less real.
The representation becomes a spectacle.
“The awareness of the suffering that accumulate in wars happening elsewhere is something constructed.
It flares up, it is shared by many people and fades from view.”
susan sontag
It creates sympathy and it shrivel sympathy. An abstract feeling of compassion is all that remains.
How to make this construction to be remembered by its context and its comprehension? How to make this construction to not fade? How those who haven’t experienced the reality of war can understand the pain
of the others?
WHERE IS THIS PLACE? How many times have you seen this place? How many images of this non-place have you seen before? These images construct an idea of generalization to those places, an idea of displacement, de-identification and, therefore, dehumanization.
