Bogor, the Story of a Flower: “My Indonesia” Photo Series (7)—Post Scriptum

Kampung Lebak Soto. Bogor, 27 August 2014

Photographs are gift. And the gift is a very important fact.

So three weeks after that first meeting I returned with some friends, photographers and curators of my exhibition to give that picture to the mother.

It was in that circumstance that an event happened that I often tell during my workshops, which has to do with the power of photography.

Actually, that moment was very touching for me. The mother was incredulous and so happy for the gift, and  I was talking to the women and meanwhile taking more photos.

The little girl in the framed portrait was clinging to the mother's leg who never stopped looking at the photograph. Then I said goodbye and went away with my friends, but realizing that she was still motionless with the frame in her hand I stopped to spy from around the corner of the street.

Then I saw some women coming who lived in the same street, perhaps intimidated first by our presence. The mother proudly showed them that photograph and these women began to caress the image, all as like enchanted, with the girl in flesh and blood under them, between the legs of the mother.

A few years later I bought a splendid book, The Empty Mirror, also by Ferdinando Scianna, the same as the photo of the Benares girl, almost closing a circle.

In that book, to explain our relationship with photography and even more with the image in relation to our identity, Scianna quotes a story told by McLuhan in “Understanding media: the extension of man” (1964):

A friend meets a lady who has a beautiful baby in a wheelchair, approaches her and says: “Oh, what a beautiful baby you have!” And the mother proudly replies: “And this is nothing: you haven't seen him in photo!”

 

It may seem like a joke, but it speaks volumes about the complete reversal of our relationship with the image, we now live. No longer images of the world, images of ourselves, but images in place of the world, images in place of ourselves. 

I almost always mention this story because it was exactly what I saw that day: the real little girl completely ignored for her copy in the photograph. The mother and her friends caressed, almost with reverence, the face of the girl who meanwhile looked at them from below.

And all this simply because that face was printed and placed in a frame, it had turned into something special. Outside that house, the peeling wall and the rubbish at the edges of the dark, narrow road.

Art had redeemed their simple lives, in their minds.

This is an excerpt from the story of the Bogor girl and the power of Photography that is able to make the ordinary special, simply by putting a face printed in a frame.

After writing that article, which it liked very much, I went to see those old photographs, and I also found those of the moment described above, which I had completely removed from memory.

I'm glad to show them to you, because it wasn't an exaggeration but it really happened.

Never underestimate the influence that photographs have on those who observe and are subject to them.

Kampung Lebak Soto. Bogor, 27 August 2014

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