A photo from the BBC news site of a U.S. soldier interrogating a detainee in Iraq. A horrified woman looks on.
Of course, what the caption tells you and what you see and feel from this image are completely opposite. What you “read” in this picture, what your visual sense tells you, is that the American is bestowing some sort of divine gift, and the man is kneeling out of respect, adoration and thankfulness. The light of God floods down. Like an image of Jesus offering alms or sustenance to a beggar, for example. I doubt if anything at all like that is going on here — in this way the photo contradicts its own caption… something I see quite a lot of. What we read and feel from the image gives us a completely different interpretation of the scene from its written description. But which do we “feel” is more “true”? I would guess in the cases of these loaded images, images that resonate strongly, we believe what we see over and above what we are told.
I thought this photo mimics a Caravaggio, but didn't have a specific painting in mind.
I sent it to Lawrence Weschler who has in the past contributed a series of “convergences” to various issues of McSweeney’s, and he pointed out the two images below:
A woman in Malawi who was forced to have ritual “cleansing” sex with a relative after her husband died
And Velázquez’s painting of Aesop
The African woman and Aesop painting are awfully close. Makes you think there are art directors out there staging documentary photographs with art history books in hand. The real world is made in the image of powerful works of art. Could this be?
Do I think that these journalistic photographers and their editors at least harbor unconscious or conscious archives of "art" imagery that they strive to imitate? Sometimes, but in addition I think that there's the fact that a lot of "art" imagery originally drew on iconic symbols and relationships which are deeply imbedded in the brain, and the paintings that manifest these archetypes in turn draw their resonant power from those... so photojournalists are simply doing the same thing as the brain does — gravitating towards iconic resonant images that everyone harbors, not necessarily imitating paintings... and it almost appears as if the choices of these images are limited, because similar imagery pops up again and again.
It’s a Jungian idea — that we harbor archetypes that are the visual and psychological equivalent of molecular receptors, like those for drugs and hormones lying in wait in different areas of the brain. The idea also reminds me of Plato’s proposal that the world is a shadow version of these archetypical images.
It’s a little hard to believe that the choice of images could be that limited and that it would explain why these bizarre correspondences across time and space, that there are a finite set of moving images that we gravitate towards — but these congruencies are awfully close. Too close to be entirely accidental, I think.Lawrence Weschler will have a whole book on this phenomenon out early next year called Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.
