Images always make it possible to see something, acting as a door that give access to contents and pieces of information that are translated as narrations, stories, myths, memories, desires, fantasies and dreams. This is because an image is defined as a medium that always arouses in those who observe it a story. A story that will always raise a message, something between what really happened and what can happen, or even as Todorov pointed out “when the event happened to me and the moment when I described it” (Todorov, 2002: 151).
Besides, the process of condensation of such a story in a single image rests basically on the usage of the pair of tools that both poetry and psychology value, which are metonymy and metaphor. First, metonymy would be understood as the briefing of what is most important in something that comprises it all, integrating a referent that by deploying its meaning involves all that it contains (Lacan, 1990: 20). Secondly, metaphor is conceptualized as the senses’ game between what something means and something else that will be able to mean, playing with the senses, changing the sense of things, mobilizing meanings, imagining realities and possibilities, interpreting scenes, creating hopes and desires, giving that desire directions and form, teaching to desire, awakening or recreating feelings in our bodies. In other words, generating meaning. Therefore, the act of anchoring meaning, captures the ideological power to fill up the empty container of any expression and offering a whole sense to the subjects. In this way an image could define things, while the act of image design could be considered as an action that is performed over the sense of a being.
©Sebastian Guerrini, 2009
