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The
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22
original texts by artists and curators
LAURENT GERVEREAU, IGNACIO RAMONET and ARTHUR KROKER give their
opinion on this question Special projects by ROBIN COLLYER and
IKÉ UDÉ
Interviews with BARBARA KRUGER and KEN LUM
240 pages, over 200 illustrations More than a hundred photographers
from the international artistic scene
The catalogue is available at Vox,
centre de diffusion de la photographie (514) 390.0383 and in
librairies at a cost of 39,95$
Editorial
Power and Images
Ambitious, persuasive, seductive, sometimes insidious, authoritarian
or violent, always fascinating - images abound. This proliferation
no doubt explains the fact that our times are currently defined
as a society of the image. With the generalization of live TV
and the advent of the Internet, the image has now reached a
new stage and is engaged with much assurance in the era of globalization.
Images now circulate, in the industrialized world, at such a
speed that they reach thousands of individuals, in all corners
of the new map created by networking, simultaneously. If the
era of telecommunications has allowed for the massive circulation
of images, has the global village also ensured the universality
of their content? Are images themselves tending to become “global”?
Today, everyone recognizes that the visual universe in which
we are immersed helps to compose our mental representations.
Images ineluctably shape us, and thus our perceptions, actions,
attitudes, and behaviours are likely to be conditioned by them.
The proof is the colossal investments made by the cultural industries
and the media in marketing and the huge budgets devoted to advertising.
As it takes global dimensions, the economy allows mega-corporations
to fabricate images based on the expectations, desires, and
aspirations of the majority. The messages, values, and ways
of life that movie, media, and advertising conglomerates promote
is becoming uniform. Of course, their images differ from each
other’s, but many of them are based on similar structures and
codes: they repose essentially on the comfort of repetition,
immediate communication, and the rapid assimilation of meaning.
The power of such a “global image” is, of course, disquieting,
as Ignacio Ramonet emphasizes. He deplores the fact “that it
reduces human beings to a mass state and impedes the structuring
of emancipated individuals, capable of discerning and deciding
freely; that it replaces, in the minds of citizens, the legitimate
aspiration to independence and awareness with perilously regressive
conformity and passiveness; finally, that it legitimizes the
idea that people wish to be fascinated, led astray, and deceived
in the confused hope for a sort of hypnotic satisfaction that
will make them forget, for an instant, the absurd, cruel, and
tragic world in which they live.”1 The global image fabricates
a collective sensibility while ensuring that each individual
recognizes himself or herself in it. Thus, even while we think
we are seeing images, it is, rather, ideological designs upon
us that we are consuming.
The ambition of this seventh edition of Mois de la Photo à
Montréal is to question the stakes related to these new
powers of the image. Pooling the research of artists, exhibition
curators, and image experts, the biennale becomes an exceptional
laboratory for understanding the mutations of the image in contemporary
culture. A number of artistic practices today, in fact, are
affected by these important issues. They bring to light the
rhetorical strategies of producers of global images; take apart
the formal codes and conventions of Hollywood cinema and television
images; destabilize advertising images by parodying their tactics
or imitating their slogans; restage images from political and
sports news; or make ironic comments on the representations
of masculinity and femininity widely used by fashion and advertising.
No matter which attitude is adopted, however, what each of these
practices demonstrate, as the texts accompanying them here eloquently
attest, is how much the aesthetic experience still has the power
to make us take a more critical and attentive look at all of
these images that we consume so eagerly. In addition to questioning
the future of images, the theme “The Power of the Image” also
questions power relations. It thus highlights the need to observe
the image and its link to the social field and requires that
we probe its modalities of interaction. Power, as Barbara Kruger
explains in this catalogue, “is found in all our conversations,
all our exchanges, in every face we kiss.” It essentially takes
form in our relations with others. A number of artists, fascinated
by the phenomenon, have decided to infiltrate the public space,
creating interventions that encourage spectators, city dwellers,
and pedestrians who encounter them to become active in their
questioning. For although the power of the image is usually
recognized by its impact on the individual looking at it - activating
a diversity of reactions, from desire and attraction to persuasion
and denunciation, from iconization to stigmatization - we might
well think that the movement of this power is reversed when
individuals appropriate the image to give it a unique meaning.
Thus, although mediatization and modalities of interaction,
Though theseas two main phenomena linked to the image,its mediatization
and itsmodalities of interaction, provide a structure for the
present work, it is as a consequence the public - visitors to
the galleries,book, it is the public (gallery-goers, pedestrians
and passersby, TV viewers, we readers, and others -passerby,
TV viewers, and even we readers) who travel through it from
part to part.cover to cover. The public is the first group to
be mobilized by this manifestation, since it is the reaction
of viewersfrom viewers’ reactions to the images that informs
uswe can learn about the true nature of those images’ power.
Thus,Consequently, this thematic section of Le Mois de la Photo
àMontréal, within which every efforts is made
to multiply interactions between the art milieu and the public,
to facilitate encounters, exchanges, and debates, is perhaps,
more an observatory than a laboratory. This publication is its
extension.even more than a laboratory, an observatory. Its extension
is to be found in the following pages.
Marie-Josée Jean
Director
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal
-1. Ignacio Ramonet, Propagandes silencieuses,
Paris, Galilée, 2000, p. 10
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