Images

Images have tremendous power over us. From bygone cultures to the present they are preeminent aspects of society. A painting, an advertisement, and a photo can change the way we engage with the world.

In older cultures and perhaps present day, there were beliefs that images were intimately intertwined with what they portrayed. In Gombrich’s “The Story of Art” he explores this a bit. In ancient cave art it is proposed that drawings of conquered animals would effect the hunt. Voodoo dolls are an example of this kind of practice. He made the point that even if we are far removed from this belief, we still carry an evolutionary trait for this association. For example, most of us would be resistant to poking out a loved one’s eyes in a photo. Why does this make us uncomfortable? We logically know it won’t harm the other, but it still causes us to pause.

Images have a power and a hold on us, and we use them to have power over others. So this makes me think of art, the power of art over us, or even the uncomfortable nature of it. Take nude art, or the more realistic style of art through nude photographs. The painting and the photograph may be depicting the same model and the same pose, but the photo tends to make people more uncomfortable, it’s more real. Are we afraid that it is too close? Maybe because it confronts us and dislodges the comfort of the abstract buffer. We have to ask why this does though, why is one easier to engage with than the other? And if so, is that a bad thing?

My suspicion is that it’s uncomfortable because nudity is a part of sexuality and that typically makes people shrink back. We are not at ease confronting a topic that we have explored very little of. It Is easier to confront it abstractly because we don’t have a manual for how to approach it. It is an unknown and therefore begets fear. And it will remain so until we understand it.

In the words of Stephen King “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered.”