June, 20th, 2014

FLORENCE PITTI UOMO 86 | THE PITTI PRINCESSES

To pho tograph is to appropriate the thing pho tographed. It means putting oneself in to a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now no torious first fall in to alienation, habituating people to abstract the world in to printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it in to a mental object, than pho tographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are h andmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Pho tographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Susan Sontag RAFFAELE CAVICCHI | GOODFELLAS – IMP