The pictures in this series that started 15 years ago all stem from a purely intellectual, non-artistic point of view. By intellectual, I mean tempers flaring during a meal of smoked spaghetti where the delirious daily news items were picked through and given justice by a group of abstract realists.
It was from this rich soil that the idea emerged to buffer up the visual news that invades our homes at lightning speed through satellite dishes 24/7 and cable vision faster, more often, closer, too late. Our minds have been formatted to absorb, with the same emotion, pictures from an African famine and those of a car race stripping across the continent with trucks of dollars… For hours we consume pictures of tides of tricolor larvae climbing up the Champs-Elysées, celebrating a victory while elsewhere a young child chasing a ball dies after stepping on a mine…
Pushed by profit, market value, power, television news has totally transformed our desires, and our emotions are politically charged.
But we can turn off the television and make our minds available to the realities of the world. Not those of soft drink salesmen and their brightly colored pictures, but the vibrant reality, often in black and white, of the world as seen by McCullin, Burnett, Greene, Poveda… whose photographic images reach beyond mere emotion.
Now there are billions of computers humming in living rooms, backpacks, pockets: I myspace, you blog, he twits, we facebook, you youtube and they infuriate. These new technologies helped some develop a greater sense of freedom, but they have become as dangerous as repression tools. They have undoubtedly perverted our approach to news, where one click transforms a story into another, virtual and ephemeral, without analysis, without soul, without humanity.
Bruno Pilia, (Allez les vers !, extrait)
