Hello and good 2011.
This is the first post of this new year, and I decided to dedicate it to one of the books I read in the past 365 days: "Reading the Photograph - by Augusto Pieroni.
I do not entertain them in a tedious review of a text that has no need for celebration and should not be missing in the list of "books read" for anyone interested in real photography. I want to focus instead on the two pages (No. 70 and 71 in my edition) that carry over: A list of questions you can ask ourselves to an image.
course to fully understand the meaning of those pages, which are the author calls "case studies", I highly recommend reading the entire volume through explanation and analysis of internal and external contexts , illustration of the 5 operational factors ( retrieval, processing, purchasing, process, edition) and the hypothetical and general rating of content and thematic factors, offering amazing tools to read the "figurative prose" (pass me this neologism to indicate the text, understood as a narrative content, represented by images). However, even apart from this reading, and even to stimulate curiosity and desire to deal with it, you can reason about these two pages, with a disarming simplicity that make us see how many things you can ask before any photography.
A series of questions that are increasingly asking to surrender, preferring to be carried away by the "answers" to these questions provided by someone else and for different purposes!
What I mean is that having at least an awareness that an image (a photograph for what concerns us) can bring with it a whole series of concepts that go beyond the mere reference (the subject), there would put us in a receptive condition of the size of images definitely more aware.
Many of these concepts are linked to the knowledge from those who "read" the picture: I do not have a basic knowledge of photography I can hardly ask a question on the "formal style" of the image (ie, contrast, lighting, setup fire etc.).. Many others are released from the technical concepts and questions that relate instead to historical factors, social, economic, organizational, human, physical ... In short, concepts accessible to anyone with at least one gift that has allowed human beings, struggling for sure, to go into space: the curiosity!
An appeal in short, that the consumption of images is not reduced to a passive operation, which become the target of machinations of others. The power of images in conveying the mass media is very strong, not diventiamone helpless victims and, worse, unaware!
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