The yellow time of photographs, wrote Miguel Hernández. And before photographs, the vitreous time of daguerreotypes. Another Hernández, Miguel Ángel, discovered his face on one of those plaques, embedded in a small wooden box. This writer and professor of Art History at the University of Murcia had in mind writing a novel about the portraits of the dead so associated with daguerreotypes: «I tried to get an old plate, but the prices of ‘post mortem’ daguerreotypes “They were prohibitive and I had to settle for a small ‘living’ portrait of an English lady from the mid-19th century,” he explains. When contemplating that small treasure, he confirmed that Daguerre’s invention is a mirror: «The image that I was trying to see, the negative and the positive of the anonymous woman, mixed with the reflection of my face and everything that surrounded me in the room. No matter how much I moved the object to find the perfect point of view, the plate never stopped reflecting the surrounding reality… This link between the photographed past and the present reflected on the plate justifies the “affective essays and critical fictions” that the Murcian author combines in ‘I am in the image’ (Acantilado): “What I experienced when contemplating that daguerreotype is what “It happens in any act of seeing: it is impossible to see without seeing,” he comments. Hernández considers that the so-called ‘school of suspicion’ founded by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is more necessary than ever in these times of Artificial Intelligence. «Our situation is paradoxical: at the same time we suspect and believe everything they tell us. And we believe hoaxes because they confirm our beliefs. “It’s an act of faith.” We must be suspicious of the image in the Platonic tradition of the Myth of the Cave, and he advises: “We are in danger of not understanding the world.” Images of the pain of others, the interpretation (or manipulation) of the past, uchronias or memories altered by subjectivity or political propaganda are ‘subjects’ to be overcome in the school of suspicion. Hernández turns to a photograph from his childhood; In a corner of the frame appears the murdered girl who inspired his novel ‘The Pain of Others’. The images of the jihadist massacre on August 17, 2017 on Barcelona’s Rambla raise the dilemma of whether or not to show the horror: «The key is not to show or not to show, but how to show. Showing the catastrophe without depriving dignity of the dead who did not give their permission to be photographed,” observes Hernández. Dispatched on the news between a goal from Messi or the succulence of a chef, these images become painless. In this era, “images are no longer memory, but personal communication,” he points out. In the chapter titled ‘The sink image’, the author reflects on the fragility of memory: “Nothing less reliable than a visual witness,” he warns. In the act of remembering we go from spectator to protagonist. We think of Enric Marco: “By repeating them he came to believe his own lies,” concludes Hernández.
#Miguel #Ángel #Hernández #Images #longer #memory #personal #communication
