Introduction Exercise

 

My working week is very repetitive and almost totally occupied by professional life, which takes place in my office, 100 km from where I live. 

Also, due to the restrictive measures imposed by the pandemic we all experience, we literally never leave the office except to go home. 

For these reasons I thought that carrying out this exercise was preferable on a Sunday afternoon, when I had the opportunity to go out alone and take a walk in the small town center where I live. 

I didn't expect much and instead, I was struck by the fact that I hadn't noticed how many images, how many photographs, manipulated or not, are displayed in shop windows and services. 

In a short time, and a few hundred meters, I photographed, amid the curious glances of passers-by, about 50 photographs of images of various kinds. I noticed details and signifieds (Barthes helped me ...) to which I had not paid attention before. 

In our modern world, we are surrounded and pervaded by signs, and often we don't stop to reflect on their meaning, also because we just as often dismiss them as unsolicited advertising, as an attempt to influence us and invade our privacy, our time and our way to think. This resistance is now latent in all of us and has been proportionally amplified with the growth of the size, distribution and pervasiveness of the media and their outcome. 

If I take a global look at the photos I took, I see that the vast majority of them are advertising images, be it commercial, political, social. Consequently, the messages and the signifieds they transmit also have the same nature.

 One of the details I noticed concerns the use of colour and black and white. The images of a travel agency, which represent a happy family with the background of some tourist resort or any tourist location, are always dominated by light tones and blue and green colours: the colours of nature in the summer. Browns, blacks, reds, purples are carefully avoided. 

There are tons of academic texts that delve into the psychological meaning of colours, and therefore I don't discover anything new: on the contrary, I provide yet another confirmation.

All this does not bother me, on the contrary, I need it to semantically link other images, this time in black and white, which stand out from the windows of a so-called "fair trade" shop. Even these images, while appearing to have a social origin and meaning, advertise something and send precise messages: it is as if these images and the protagonists contained therein say "... please enter this shop and buy, because the products that are here come from our lands, which do not have the bright colours of those who are well, but the black and white of those who suffer and struggle to get the products to this shop." 

If I help buying, will I see these same photos one day, in colour?