The Arab Revolt is a reportage on depiction of the so called Arabic spring. For the first time the happenings not only have been documented by citizens using their cell phones or video cameras, but have been the cause of the happenings themselves. I chose to represent this virtual reality photographing with Impossible instant film some frames taken from the home made videos and web televisions that have depicted the war and revolts. In this way not only the communicational relationship of the citizens against the regime have been modified, but also the access to a way of representing reality.
The Arab Revolt is a reportage on depiction of the events that occurred during the so called Arabic spring. For the first time the happenings not only have been documented by citizens using their cell phones, i-phones or video cameras, but have been the cause of the happenings themselves.
Because of the essential role that social networks and satellite televisions have played in the conflict, I have chosen the theme of the protests occurred in Arabic countries and their depictions as a cue for reflecting on the role of photojournalism and on the modalities through which we are informed about these events and we know them. In this sense the project presents itself on one hand as a research on the visual language of reportage photography and on its capacity and necessity to document; on the other hand as an attempt to relate two different levels of reality and to show how they are in contrast, despite how they seem to be parallel to one another.
The purpose is to create a real object through virtual material, photographing some frames taken from the home made videos and from web televisions that have depicted the war and revolts. In this way not only the communicational relationship of the citizens against the regime have been modified, but also the access to a way of representing reality.
The choice to use the Impossible Project films is a consequence of this necessity, and these films allow us to refer to the idea of a concrete object through the allusion to the imaginary of the Polaroid frame. Moreover, the peculiarity of these films of not being totally stable and of modifying themselves and aging as days go by has given me the chance to bring back the images from a timeless reality, as the virtual reality, to a concrete-objectual one, that can really show the strains of time. This effect has also the capacity of creating a contrast between the surreal sensation that the image produces, as if it belongs to a different time, and the content of the image itself that refers to an actual event, a recent event vividly imprinted in our memories. Therefore I have tried to create a conflict between the content, the container and the connotation of the image.