Jerome de Perlinghi: Fading, American History For Sale
© Jerome de Perlinghi
Walking the Line, Living In the Spaces
The VASA exhibition by American photographer Jerome de Perlinghi opens an avenue for inquiry into the nature of reportage (documentary) and social critique.
In simple terms reportage presents the viewer with a story framed by concepts of veracity and the presumed neutrality of the image based upon a lens created realism. Reportage is founded upon the recording of events, moments in time and the engagement of the reader (I use the term "reader" because it demands a reflective and active position different from that a passive viewer) in an experience that normally requires an interpretive contex, provided through captions, accompanying text or format (magazine, book, newspaper, television and screens) for meaning. Without context it is an image with multiple meanings and implications.
A gun is a gun until it is not.
Social critique transcends reportage in that the author (photographers/editors) build their story through a possible complex context created by and through the images with the intention of addressing an issue emerging out of social, political, economic, racial, and class concerns. Images do not have to be realistic or concrete, but have an interpretive position within a sequence of images. Critical to a critique are the spaces formed between the images. Here images do not function as stand alone impressions with multiple references but exist structurally, defining the whole. The sequence as it is experienced defines and narrows possible interpretations. The whole frames the story or message, not individual images. The work of filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein in developing “montage theory” where the combination of “shots” builds structure and meaning, is useful here in addressing the nature of sequence.
Sequenced images do not rely upon text external to the image but on their own representational historical knowledge – a different type of text to be experienced. That is, what the image signifies to the author (photographer) and to the reader may not be equivalent but emerges from their historical social knowledge. Meaning from this perspective is not fixed but fluid.
From the reader/viewer perspective, the visual text (and its meaning) is formed and shaped by the organization of the images within a particular format. It is a conversation of sorts between the author and the reader, between the image experience and the interpretive nature of the reader. It needs to be noted that the author, like the “reader” is not neutral, but comes to the visual text with a social history and ideological framework. This history and framework is layered on creating the experience; creating meaning. This perspective draws upon a post-modern and historical framework. It is a framework where meaning is not fixed but constructed through the interaction between the visual text and the reader. It is similar to an author selecting and organizing “words” to create a message. It is not the individual words but their sequential relationship that steers the meaning of the text.
It may be useful to note that by referring to the image as a text to be read (codified with intention), the reader moves beyond the representational nature of the image to an interpretation fueled through a post-semiotic reading and understanding the images as codified with social, cultural and historical signification. That is, the meaning of the text read, moves to an interpretative personal, cultural or social decoding level. Readers from different social, economic, political and racial histories will actually experience a different set of images.
The work of Jerome de Perlinghi offers such a possibility for the reader to build meaning(s). His work should not be read as a series of images but as a syntax, a challenge to be understood; a sequence ordered and constructed by the author. Besides the ordering of images other factors come into play. The images are black and white carrying their own references to a documentary past; images point to a time before – torn billboard images, closed buildings, aging environments (usually urban), promises of a better life and a torn and half destroyed American flag.
On their own, each image refers to a possible set of interpretations. How the viewer is led through the experience (the syntax of the sequence) begins to set borders to the experience. Steering this is the paradigmatic title of the exhibition: Fading, American History for Sale. As with the selection of images and their sequencing, the title of the exhibition steers us in a particular direction.
Perlinghi is not a passing neutral observer. He is conscious of what he is seeing and framing through the VASA exhibition. He is expressing and sequencing his notations to be experienced by readers of his text. It is here that the relationship of the reader to the experience, the construction of meaning, comes into play. Without a critical perspective (questioning and reflective, asking what is really happening here, what am I seeing), seeing the exhibit as a whole, a structure designed to be read. The danger is that the reader will flip through the images not taking the time to live in the spaces.
© Roberto Muffoletto, 2018