W006 → The Most Beautiful Abominations in the World

It is no surprise that there has always been a certain attraction by people to scenes of horror. It is part of our own nature, an instinctive curiosity driven by this scopophilic and voyeuristic pleasure for these sights. This pleasure is something already acknowledged, long before our time, by Plato in a passage from The Republic, Book IV.

“On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last, the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, ‘There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight.”

Plato already expresses at this point of history this intrinsic condition to humans of having an appetite for sights of degradation, pain and suffering. Images (either still images or moving images) have always been the perfect media to explore and satisfy this inevitable desire in a private way (or not) due to his visual qualities. Along with history this interest has been always present but the way it was observed and apprehended by us changed severely along the years. Religious art has been depicting scenes of pain and suffering for centuries so this is not something that appeared recently with other types of time-based media like video or photography. The difference is that in religious art pain and suffering are seen as a path to exaltation through sacrifice while on the contrary, for the modern sensibility pain and suffering are usually associated with either an accident or a crime.

Concerning the very unique relationship between images and the viewer, there is a certain power present in photography (also in the video, but more explicitly in photography). There is a form of alchemy possessed by photography which comes from its objectification: It allows you to own a person or an event, turn a moment into an object. These objects have since they exist worked as a form of memory. They help you revise and reconstruct the past due to their apparent transparency and objectivity (it is no coincidence a photograph can be used as proof in court but not a drawing or a painting). The fact that a machine is responsible for doing the caption and not the human hand directly gives images this credibility which is, in fact, an illusion. To photograph is to create a point of view, however impartial you try to be you will always have to make formalistic choices which will represent that point of view (yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that the photographer intentions will be the same that the image will share with the world).

“But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (...), cannot be simply transparency of something that happened, It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.”(Sontag, 2003).

It is also no surprise that you images that we have considered to be an exact reproduction or representation of reality are in fact staged, there will always be a desire to stage in photography. On top of this, your memory and past experiences also play a crucial role in the interpretation of images as these tend to trigger processes of memory and association which are unique for each person. To use these objects which seem so real to us as a form of tracing and recreating memories is in fact not as straight forward as it might appear leading frequently to ‘false truths’.

We are living a moment in history concerning images like never before. Never have so many images been created every day through so many kinds of devices (ironically, even though so many are created most of them are lost instantaneously or never seen again). In the book, six memos for the next millennium by Italo Calvino the author reflects upon what he thinks will be the characteristics that will be more relevant for in literature for our present millennium. These would be “lightness”, “quickness”, “exactitude”, “visibility”, “multiplicity” and “consistency”. Although the author is referring to literature it is not hard to transpose this idea to the field of images. Concerning quickness specifically, there is no fastest way than an image to apprehend something, yet, it is very easy and likely to make an inaccurate apprehension through an image. It is crucial that in a moment like this the photographer role is not necessarily seen as someone o creates images but has someone who dissects and analyses images that already exist.

Regarding the aspects mentioned before, there are some issues concerning photojournalism that have caught my attention and I believe are worth to be mentioned. The dissemination of massive amounts of brutal images through the media is something that we as a spectator got used to and in a way craved for. This creates a distance between the image and the viewer, it emphasizes its bidimensionality, and also leads to a form of immunity to this subjects makings us search for something more and more explicit as time goes by, some form of ultra-violence (if you compare some of the first images of war like the Spanish civil war photos taken by Robert Capa for example, to the current images found in the media it is very obvious how they change. What used to be a mere quote to an event is now as explicit and direct as it could possibly be). This use of images is causing the opposite effect of what is pretended from the start through photojournalism forcing desensitization to horror. If you observe photojournalism objectively (as most of the people would observe an image) you can find a certain form of perversion in it. When you are framing, including and excluding, your ‘object’ you are making a formalistic choice: ‘ How should I portrait this dead body?’ Therefore it is present a formalistic and aesthetical concern behind an image of paint, suffering or destruction demonstrating it in a ‘beautiful’ way. On the other hand, there is the fact that an is not self-sufficient. War photography without a context or a caption is a photograph of any war, yet it wouldn’t be absolutely preposterous to find exhibitions of war images where this happens. Also, the act itself of having a museum or a collection of war images is another form of debauchery. A museum of war photography is a collection of the world most ‘beautiful’ abominations (if it is a contest it wins the most ‘beautiful’ abomination).

On the book Regarding the pain of others by Susan Sontag, the author suggests that some images could be used as a memento mori, as an icon, but this would require a form of sacred or meditative space to look at them (which immediately reminded me of some of Christian Boltanski installations). A narrative can also be, depending on is length and detail, a possibility for one to feel obliged to look and feel more meticulously (yet, in the end, is up to the reader to decide when to close the book). What you find in this work it is not an answer to the questions raised here, it is merely an attempt to create a form of contemplation regarding this type of images.

Gonçalo Regalado Together/Apart Le Monde ou Rien Not a Love StoryUntitled (CAM)Waiting is My HobbyThe Most Beautiful Abominations in the WorldUntitled (Linea) About Email Instagram ©2024 Gonçalo Regalado

Gonçalo Regalado

Together/Apart
Le Monde ou Rien
Not a Love Story
Untitled (CAM)
Waiting is My Hobby
The Most Beautiful Abominations in the World
Untitled (Linea)

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©2024 Gonçalo Regalado