The evocative power of images

Torpignattara. Rome, 17 February 2024

“E fia la tua imagine leggera

in giugnere a veder com’ io rividi

lo sole”

(Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XVII)

I'll go back to talking about photography.

Thanks to a photograph.

It's been a long time since I've had such pleasure in taking and then looking at an image.

What a beautiful word “image”. If “photography” has a specific weight due to the act of writing, the image is lighter.

Imago -gĭnis, from Latin. Which is not only the external form of things perceived by our sight but also the “representation by artistic means of the external form of a real or fictitious thing” up to the “representation to the mind of a true or imaginary thing, through the work of memory or imagination” (as it is written in the Treccani Encyclopedia) – or imagination.

The image of a piece of reality can become a fragment of imagination. Mix real and not real.

I think this is a large part of the fascination that some photographs arouse in us.

Not only. But also the reason why it is very difficult, if not impossible, to describe in words the reason for their beauty for us, why we like them.

Just as it's not easy to explain why we like a melody, a music.

It is a fact of combination of notes which are written on the pentagram but which come to us as sounds and not as signs.

Emotion without the weight of reason that filters the reading of written notes.

As in reading a poem or a story.

Words have a completely different weight.

Words express the rational, images draw on the irrational.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his wonderful – and often cited – book, “The Visible and the Invisible”, talks about the phenomenon of reversibility regarding being in the world, which is the basis of the phenomenological vision: in where mute perception manifests itself as the carnal existence of the idea, and words as a sublimation of the flesh. The visible and the invisible of the world are extension and thought: no longer the Cartesian dualistic distinction but they are one of the other, the right and the wrong and we are part of all this, an inextricable part.

Images are imagination and carnal existence of ideas – and feelings, I add.

Returning to this photograph, I continue to have difficulty understanding the reason for the pleasure that looking at it gives me. Of course, it is possible to find obvious characteristics: the silhouette of the little girl that is framed perfectly by the shadows of the leaves of the trees, the shiny red segment of her dress, the warm light of midday, the pattern of the shadows that decorate the ground. One could even describe her as if she were a passage from a story. But it is what she evokes that cannot be said, precisely because her evocations are internal landscapes.

What in ancient Indian aesthetics is called rasa, or the emotional experience in dramatic art and poetry. In the Indo-Malay language “rasa” retains the same meaning of feeling, of taste.

It's the basis of the emotional experience and enjoyment of an artistic experience.

In reality, the inability to explain the reasons for what we like to observe or listen to is not our limit, even if centuries of logical dominance over emotional-perceptual experience make us believe so.

As Merleau-Ponty tells us, phenomenal reality is a chiasm, a reversible and embodied intersection of experience, perception, ideas and words.

Our perceptions are our words made flesh, the pleasure we feel, silent, is already a speech.

Perhaps that is precisely the charm of this simple photograph: the beauty of not being able to say anything.

Italian version