Eastern Partnership Photography
Luciano Gloor:
Audiences have to be taught
to ‘read’ pictures
Luciano Gloor, Team Leader of the Regional Monitoring &
Capacity Building Unit (RMCBU) of the Eastern Partnership Culture
Programme, shares his thoughts on the role of photography and
prospects of transnational photography projects in the Eastern
Partnership and beyond.
– Among other areas of culture in
Eastern Partnership countries, where
would you place photography? What
would you say is the role of photography in shaping the cultural development in the Eastern Partnership
countries?
– To begin with, let me say some
words on the role that images play and
in general the role of what we see for
our perception of reality. Mankind is
by nature a very visual species. What
we see influences us more than what
we hear. In human interpersonal communication, only 30% of the exchanged
information results from the spoken
words, while we draw 70% of the information from the non-verbal communication that, whether we want it or not,
is exchanged between communicating people. This must be so, because
human communication is older than
language and verbal communication.
Meaning, whether we believe, what we
hear, whether we will remember what
we hear, whether we find relevant what
we hear, and so on, depends by 30% on
the words that we hear, but by 70% on
how they are communicated to us. I
can’t give you a percentage, but there is
for sure one auditive component in this
non-verbal communication, which is
the voice that speaks, and how we emotionally perceive it. But the big chunk
of this 70% non-verbal communication
consists of what we see. The non-verbal
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exchange of interpersonal communication goes through body language, face
mimics and the overall visual perception of the speaker by the listener as
well as of the contextual set-up, the
situation in which the communication
is happening. Thus, almost 70% of the
information is created by the effect of
what we see.
What does this has to do with photography, you will ask. Well, a lot. The
world started already decades ago to
become a world dominated by images.
In the era of the Internet this effect
has increased exponentially: written
text and spoken words are less and less,
still and moving pictures are more and
more flooding our senses and our perception, in all media, offline and online,
printed and digital, in the news, in advertisements and publicity, in films and
on television, in social media and more
and more even in direct interpersonal
exchange among individuals, where
“selfies” and photo shots are replacing written text. What was the beginning and forms the basis of nowadays
universe of images? It is photography!
Even moving pictures are nothing but
photographic stills that are shown at
a speed that make our eyes, our brain,
believe that they see movement and
animated pictures.
In other words, photography has become the dominating medium for our
society.
As a result, the role of pictures in
shaping our perception of culture, in
shaping our perception of the world, in
shaping our image of who we think we
are and where we belong to and who we
are not and do not belong to, thus also
in shaping our values and attitudes, has
become enormous. This is especially
true of the role that photographic pictures play. Why?
Photography is a technology and a
craft that claimed since its invention to
replace all other forms of human visualisation because of being superior to
them in depicturing the world: it climed
to be able to duplicate, to mirror reality.
A painter depict his own personal vision of what he sees, and thus a painting is by its nature always a subjective
reflection of what is depicted. Now, a
photographer uses a technical device,
the camera, that in a more or less “objective” mechanical-optical process records what is depicted and thus it can
clime to be the closest to reality, in
any case much closer than a subjective
painting.
For better or for worse, this became
the predominant perception of photography, the medium that allows us to record and preserve the reality of our life,
of events, of our society.
We had to go through the terrible
aberrations of authoritarian and inhuman propaganda regimes in the 20th