You have to realize how intense the circulation of new photos and media images is. It is something as powerful as the Gulf Stream, the current that runs between America and Europe. It’s a current that binds these two continents together in an extraordinary way. Better it stays that way. The photo is as it should be. Simple, intense, it’s hard to pretend for long that exoticism, for example, prevents us from seeing what we’re looking at.
A photograph by Mohammed Salem, who works for Reuters, won this year’s edition of the World Press Photo. The moment when the jury’s verdict was announced in Amsterdam was itself the scene for a good photo. A cultural institution in a former church interior, in a presbytery, the winning photo in the place of an altarpiece, with concerned officials, bureaucrats, and the press all around.
It may seem that the comparison with one of the four versions of Magritte’s painting Les Amants is far-fetched. What links the Gaza photograph with the Surrealist Lovers from 1928? Covered faces, is that not enough?
It is an issue as delicate as a warm sea current. The general answer, which helps to see more clearly why such images win, is a very old phrase that describs all life, probably every life: eros kai thanatos / έρως και θάνατος. How many poetry collections, how many watercolor collections have been titled like that, the perfect cliché! Love and death, that’s exactly what it means.
Despite the continuous work of the stock exchange, markets, the great AI language models, and the secret laboratories, we all have so little left. For some, it seems, even less. It’s a slightly melodramatic phrase by today’s cool linguistic standards. A note on the melodramatic nature of Magritte’s painting was included in the description on the website of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Don’t put too much faith in the accuracy of museum descriptions.
We will not find out why Magritte returned to this motif four times. The fact is that his mother drowned when he was fourteen. It was the Belle Époque, before the First World War. Women went about in long dresses that, when wet, draped tightly over the body .
If you click on the link with the painter’s biography, the reliable Wikipedia will reveal everything to you. This is supposedly a huge advantage of our times. After all, it is impossible to live without finding out everything, without seeing for oneself, on own’s own screen what’s deeper down there . Rest assured, all in good time.
For now, let’s look at the prize-winning photographs. It’s not always possible to touch, to the quick.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Magritte
