“The shocking images of people jumping from the Twin Towers have had a profound impact on our collective memory. In the meanwhile, with equal yet opposite urgency, they have become the target of an incessant suppression strategy” (M. Carbone, L’evento dell’11 settembre 2001, p. 131)
In his aesthetic perfection and tangible horror, the falling man portrayed in the infamous September, 11th 2001 photograph is the image that better encapsulates the tragedy of that day, which has come to represent a real watershed moment in history. Yet, it became the immediate target of a ferocious censorship crusade, so much so that on Esquire, Junod wrote “In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11th”. “Something extreme and overstepping qualified that image against our thinking reference system and did so to such an extent to make it look unbearable and, therefore, requiring to be removed. Which doesn’t simply mean buried under the carpet but rather ousted and almost “quarantined off” so as to prevent its resurfacing. This made it twice invisible; firstly because hidden away and secondly because obstructed in its potential occurrences to resurface (see: Mauro Carbone, L’evento dell’11 settembre 2001. Quando iniziò il XXI secolo, Mimesis, Milan, 2021).
The image of the drowned body of 2-year old Aylan Kurdi found washed up on the beach had a different destiny but a similar outcome.
Having become the target of insatiable media overexposure, which had the effect of quickly desensitizing our gaze, that photograph lost most of its powerful impact somehow becoming, in itself, almost perfectly invisible due to an excess of media coverage.
This does not mean that that image has become void of its ability to shock, or of its traumatogenic nature, but that it now takes our anaesthetised gaze a long detour in order to be affected by it. It is as if we needed to make an extra effort to achieve an authentic emotional experience of that image.
Desensitisation is, after all, another form of suppression. Clearly, overexposure and obliteration represent only two of the options that can alter the power of a photograph by voiding it. However, there is a more dangerous one. Indeed, we can always try to oppose desensitisation and, even more so, censorship, but attempting to resist something that affects our contemporary aesthetic and emotional relationship with the world – the intertwining between hyperrealism and irrealism – is significantly more challenging. In other words, we are so accustomed to the fictional hyperrealism of virtual images that compared to them, the power of reality risks being dissipated whilst the possibility of establishing a difference between reality and fiction is in jeopardy. The violence that dominates the contemporary blockbuster cinema – derived collective consciousness is a current and self-explanatory example. Equally evident is the fact that the violence portrayed in action films and videogames cannot fit in with reality. No living creature would ever survive – not even for a couple of minutes – the ordeal our modern heroes go through in action movies. Yet, despite it being fictional violence, it is depicted in a highly hyper-realistic way with devastating consequences – that is the possibility, if not the inevitability, that documentary footage from the war in Ukraine is approached as if it were a film or a videogame.
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