ABSTRACT
In a world increasingly flooded by visual stimuli, images enter our lives today, in their manifold dialogues with digital technology, in new unexpected modalities, morphing their nature and appearances, gathering new functions, roles, and meanings. This chapter aims at offering an exploration of this domain from a particular vantage point. Cinema and photography, the two dominating visual languages of modernity, build on rules and assumptions that they inherited from previous visual practices and in particular from Renaissance perspective. Indeed, the dominant status of the meaning of images that accompanied perspective can be easily questioned when looking at those visual cultures that belong to other times and spaces. New images are the result of a different process of production of visible evidence. New images are, in fact, similar to images belonging to “other” places and time, objects of contemplation and reciprocality rather than of representation and narration.
