User:Yoana Buzova / Jordine Seijdel

The text starts by exploring the different subjects raised by the exhibition “Inconvenient Evidence” (a selection of trophy-images made by US soldiers in Iraq) in ICP , organized by Brian Wallis, only about five months after the photos of the torture in Abu Ghraib became public for the first time. The exhibition generated discussions on ethics, courage and raised question about truthfulness in professional vs. amateur work. It forced questions about mass democratized digital production media (especially portable, such as mobile phones+built-in cameras) being intuitively used as journalistic medium and forming public opinion. The “amateur” is more difficult to control and impose bans on, than the professional photojournalist. The “amateur” could be anyone, anywhere, anytime, the amateur is the crowd, that produces 'wild images'. The crowd is the subject and creator of reality and feels a necessity to visually consume anything since it cannot be physically present. That brings us to the point when the public is there not to intervene in reality or be a part of it, but simply to record it. Nevertheless, hand-in-hand with this comes the more increasingly fading evidential value of documentary images. Image manipulation caused a global suspicion that immediately questions the veracity of any amateur, documentary-look-like image in the media. In the end we come to a point where most people live just to have a record of their lives. They live to pose, to be all the time on display. Events start to be created to be documented. Modern public space is designed to become transparent and open. However the flood of “wild” images reveal how the paradigm of this visibility is after all an illusion.