The Image Dictatorship
by Marco López
May
27, 2012
If an image is worth 1000 words, then, in the hands of a visual artist, it is important that those words are chosen properly. They can be arranged in millions of different ways to express anger, fun, joy, hate or love. They can be constructive or destructive, be the engines that deliver hope or the hammers that strike with anxiety our hearts and brains. Powerful Images can with ease play with the flow of the chemicals inside us and cause sensitive revolutions in humans of all conditions. No matter how invulnerable you think you are, an image, or a series of them, will sooner or later cause a chemical chaos inside you, and will activate the proper areas of your brain to make you cry, laugh, sing, trigger your deepest fears and even make you fall in love.
It is well known that since World War II the power that images have on individuals or large groups of people was discovered, and they were manipulated to create concepts enhanced with hyperbolic ideologies. Today, more than half a century later, images are still used under the same principle by large multinational corporations and people keep on succumbing to their power. The 30 second TV spot is the most powerful piece of communication that the human has ever come up with, because images educate, change points of view at great scale and therefore produce the perfect stimulus to trigger a reaction. We are in an iconic world where images govern us. We are not, (in the words of the Italian thinker Giovanni Sartori) "homo sapiens" (Men that think) anymore, we have rather became "homo videns" (Men that see).
So, we are ruled by images, they govern us even without us knowing. We live in a world where "WYSIWYA" (What you see is what you are). We feed ourselves with images, millions of them per day, and like that, our brain becomes an amazing image factory that filters by approving or rejecting what it gets. Nevertheless, the brain doesn't only receive images from outside, but by mixing all those images and blending them with thousands of emotions, ideas and concepts produces its own images through what we call "dreams". My photography tries to reproduce, using a bunch of packed pixels, what my brain produces in the form of dreams and short written stories. Somehow, it has come up with floating things, objects in strange positions, people in strange situations and lights where they should not be: Plastic panoramas and artificial landscapes. The tools? A famous threesome: camera, lighting equipment and Adobe Photoshop. Have there ever been such passionate lovers like these to help you see your dreams become true?
Maybe one day the importance of images will become an institution. There will be "pictotherapy" where people get cured by watching the correct images to heal their troubled minds like in Stanley Kubrik's "A clockwork Orange", and the first Image Republic will be born, the first "Pictocracy" .
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Marco Lopez. Born and raised in Mexico City, currently intoxicated with nature, art, books and science. Immigrated to Canada four years ago to chase his dreams (with a camera). E-mail: marco.v.lope@gmail.com Web site: www.marcolopezportfolio.com See more of Marco's images at the following web sites: |
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