I. FACING THE FLOOD
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel & Nicola Carboni
The Visual Contagions project addresses a fundamental theoretical problem: images overwhelm us, and we are unsure how to deal with this chaos.
The great leveling?
As a cultural phenomenon, globalisation is often the subject of quick ideas - too quick. One reads that it has been leveling cultures downwards since the 1950s, and that the world has been shrinking since the 1990s with the arrival of the Internet. Others argue that it is the result of a cultural industry dominated by big business. It is often claimed that the circulation of images supports the global dominance of the USA and its media system. Or that only a protectionist approach to culture would enable the world's diversity to be maintained. Others, on the contrary, refuse to mention homogenizations; they argue that the peripheries have always been able to rework and appropriate cultural objects from afar; that the centers have themselves been influenced by images from elsewhere, and that cultural predation never hinders recompositions in which the peripheral cultures are actors.
Are we "Americanized" by the image? Marilyn Monroe, the world's Covergirl of glossy magazines at the turn of the 1960s.
The Visual Contagions project arises from these concerns. Its ambition is to understand to what extent globalization has changed our imagery and which, if any, are the places and routes where images have circulated the most. We begin our study from a specific moment, 1890, the beginning of an era of accelerated circulation of images between continents. In the history of publishing, the 1890s heralded the emergence of a new type of 'visual economy'. Illustrations were at the time a regular feature of the daily press in the northern hemisphere, and illustrated periodicals circulated more widely as photographic printing techniques became more sophisticated. Such changes brought new paradigms, new visions, and new criticism. More specifically, images played a more important role in everyday life. The image acquired a new status, moving from a distant material object to a ubiquitous object, available in many places and forms at the same time.