It is not only politicians who attach great importance to imagery. We all do. Everyone knows that no one can control the future, and yet we want to. At the very least, we want to determine how future generations look at us, at our mistakes and, above all, at our successes. That is why we try to bend the language in such a way that it seems as if we can look ahead. And we do that through the word icon. When the chaos and panic at the airport in Kabul was so immense that desperate Afghans clung to the landing gear of departing planes and were thrown into the air, the images were immediately called ‘iconic’. While an icon is simply an image, or an image. What are those unfortunate air refugees a picture of?
But the word icon means more. It also represents traditional paintings of Christ or another saint on a panel, such as those found in many Eastern Orthodox churches. You will also find icons on a computer or telephone screen, they are icons, symbols that indicate an action or function instead of text. For example, the stylized image of a trash can stands for ‘move information that no longer matters here’.
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Icon comes via Latin from Greek eikon which means likeness, image and portrait. Hence the icons such as the portraits of saints by the famous medieval Russian master Andrei Rublov, the iconostasis, the wall with statues and paintings in the Orthodox churches behind which the mysteries unfold. The heretical iconoclasts, like real iconoclasts, demolished all effigies from their churches in the eighth and ninth centuries. But in no way do these meanings connect with the iconic image of refugees hanging from an airplane.
Value judgement
For that we have to go to English. Mid last century got the word icon there is an extra meaning. It shifted from image to image: ‘persons or things that are seen as representative, as a symbol for a movement or a culture and therefore also as a person or institution that commands respect’. These new meanings have spread to mainland Europe and in 1996 a Dutch newspaper could already write about Steve Jobs, who equipped the computer with easy-to-use icons, but who has now become an icon himself. The Humanist Association honors Hedy d’Ancona as a feminist icon.
The iconic image from Kabul is not about admiration, on the contrary, but about a photo that would be representative of the chaotic approach and panic, a photo that determines the negative image. But how do we know? Surely we can only determine in retrospect what exactly happened and which picture is representative of it? We don’t resign ourselves to that; we try to impose our image, our value judgment on future generations with the word iconic.
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