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Guest
05-May-2006 16:23
i won't write as much as the people here, mainly because english isn't my native language..
In any case words are not enough sometime.
This is a beautiful image..
I am not sure where one previous poster gets 'visa for exile' from! The title of the poster is 'Visages de l'exil', which is French for (The) Faces of Exile. Nor do I think the word 'surrealist' is an appropriate academic term for the shot. If the notion of depersonalization means anything here it is in a post-modern sense, in terms of the nature of surveillance on urban space and the feeling of paranoia that the post-modern condition can give rise to. The picture is doubly interesting because Breitenbach was a portrait photographer, who is now gazing on the faceless.
Guest
11-Jul-2005 07:56
This is so awesome, I can not explain exactly why as these other two have, so I just say ............I LOVE IT!!
Guest
27-May-2005 21:33
Now that I am seeng your picture with more detainment I have found an other important feature to it.
At first I thought that is was an other eye connection between the poster and the 'unidentified' people going trhoe the metro, but everything changed when I saw the title of the poster 'Visa for exile'. Very very sharp photo Ruth one one hand it brings us too the past with it's, almost, monocrome colour. The people seem like the ghosts of who'm never came back from the extermination camps during World War II
These ghosts beeng seen by the protagonist of the poster, with scared eyes just horrored by what is happening.
On the other hand, I also can see the subway as a kind of exile, in the end, the subway is too a transport for taking people to an other place, perhaps some of them to an exile or perhaps some of them to their personal concentration camp, who knows.
This is the most surrealistic image in this gallery, set in the very city where surrealism was born. The face on the posters, repeated twice, is unemotional. The exhibition, called "Faces of the Exile" could well be based on the concept of alienation, because that is what how your image makes me feel. And if I feel it, you must have felt it, too, Ruthie. The expressionless eye keeps bearing down on us, again and again, as if in a drumbeat, while the blurred figures rush past its stare. It is as if it does not exist. But it does. In psychiatry, alienation is defined as a state of depersonalization in which the self seems unreal, and emotions are inhibited. You have indeed depersonalized these blurred figures, while stressing the lack of emotion in the repeated face on the poster. And you do it in surrealistic form by irrationally juxtaposing the poster with the bodies. It is a chilling image, which is an indication of the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Alienation, Surrealism, and Paris -- an appropriate match.
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