Urbanautica

ON THE SENSE OF SEEING: WHY READ A PHOTOGRAPHY

by Elisa Dainelli

We are struck by what attracts our attention or tickles our appetites, but we do not try to understand what lies behind each image, or perhaps we rarely do. Somehow, most of the time, we activate a very superficial reading level.

© Giorgio Salomon

I recently had the opportunity to read the introduction written by Steve Bisson to Giorgio Salomon's book, "Reportage of a Lifetime." Alongside the wonderful photographs that the photojournalist has collected over the years, Bisson has developed a fascinating reflection on the meaning of looking at pictures and the need to read them in the contemporary world of social networks and AI.

© Giorgio Salomon, "Il reportage di una vita", Antiga Edizioni, 2023

© Giorgio Salomon

He compares photography to the "diavolina" (Italian words for common firelighter) that lights the flame of memory, which allows you to preserve a memory or lead the viewer towards other worlds. In this sense, the image, the main object of the most developed of our senses, the sight, would be nothing other than the privileged way to activate emotions, to guide the observer to participate in the visual, and, why not, to be absorbed within a community feeling. Photographs like Salomon's can undoubtedly do this: photos that bring us back to more or less well-known events in Italian and world history, direct evidence of a not-too-distant past.

© Giorgio Salomon, "Il reportage di una vita", Antiga Edizioni, 2023

© Giorgio Salomon

When faced with such images, we activate a sort of cultural countertransference; we respond to the impact of what we see with an emotion that refers us to our experience. Therefore, the photographs of the displaced people of the Vajont disaster strike us more than those taken in Yemen or Afghanistan, or, to understand contexts so distant from our experience, we associate the situations seen with something we have felt in our direct experience.

© Giorgio Salomon

Reading a photograph, however, is more than this. It becomes a point of contact between what the photographer chose to see, that precise portion of space, and what to show to the public; the spark allows the meeting between messenger and listener. When we look at an image, we can activate different reading levels. The Italian photographer Giovanni Gastel declared years ago: «The challenge for me is to ensure that the viewer stays looking at one of my photos for more than five seconds.» In the contemporary world of social networks and the continuous use of images, we cannot spend more than a few seconds, certainly less than five, observing what we see. We are struck by what attracts our attention or tickles our appetites, but we do not try to understand what lies behind each image, or perhaps we rarely do. Somehow, most of the time, we activate a very superficial reading level. Pausing, therefore, constitutes the main action of seeing: allowing the mind to process a message, "listening" to what the photographer wanted to tell us. Observing a photograph turns into a path of looking out over a time window that takes us back to the moment of the shot, to the expressive will of the author.

The point of contact occurs when both experiences appear in front of the possible message, which does not always coincide precisely between the photographer and the reader. Then, the wealth of experience and knowledge of both is activated. The reader draws from the message in the image as much as from one's cultural world. However, what emerges from a slow approach to reading is the possible panorama of interpretations we observers develop concerning the story the photographer offers. Thus begins a complex interweaving of narratives, a science of the uniqueness of each object, as Italo Calvino defined it, whereby there is a profound diversity between what can be read in an image (the Barthesian studium) and the involuntary aspect, engaging that each of us notices in it (the punctum). The intimate and personal union between the photographer's vision and the observer's reading opens the way to many possible encounters between the two subjects mentioned above and other potential readers.

In conclusion, I could only define looking at the photographs as a long journey of encounter, a glimpse into other worlds and into the minds of those who have chosen that portion of space, in a quick instant like the wink between two passers-by, where past and present they mix in a single dance.

Giorgion Salomon, "Il Reportage di una vita", 2023

share this page