Images and more images

Abstract

Today everything happens through images, and a lot happens through photographic images. These can be used in multiple and contradictory ways: some eminently aesthetic, which retain the purpose of electing the image as an artistic artifact, or mainly cultural, which retain the purpose of documenting a significant aspect of reality, are frequently overridden by purely functional uses, which exploit the image for utilitarian purposes, or simply self-representative uses, which record useless moments of human existence only to legitimize it. This is the natural consequence of an epochal social change: the production of photographic images, once the prerogative of a few, is now within everyone’s reach. Image overload is the first and most evident consequence of the democratization of the production of images which, once their lives have ended, tend to be relegated to the entropic oblivion of images stored forever, thus adding to the hypertrophic mass of digital data stored but not used. The recovery of control over this visual hyper-productivity can only pass through the reactivation of our critical capacity.