Drawing is truer than photography, anyone who has tried to keep a memory with a pencil instead of a click knows. Merit of concentration: the image is fixed in the mind, before being on paper.
Memories and drawings
But we must know how to use the pencil: the app that makes us all designers has not yet been invented. It should also be said that, despite the cell phone in our pocket, we are not all photographers either: because the photographer is a draftsman who uses light instead of a pencil.
So, strictly speaking, first you learn to draw and then you can understand something about photography if you want to know more about this topic click here to visit Eden-Gallery website.
How mobile phones affects our memories
Today, we tend to rely very little on memory, and deliver a great deal of data to the cloud. Not only is it now almost impossible to remember poems by heart, but usually even the most intimate events are recorded on our mobile phones.
Rather than remembering what we ate at someone’s wedding, let’s look in the cell phone archive for all the food photos we took on that occasion. This has serious consequences. Taking photos of an event instead of immersing ourselves in it generates a poorer memory of the real event: because we get distracted while we do it.
Relying on photos to recall a certain fact has a similar effect. To function well, memory must be exercised regularly. There are many studies that document the importance of training in memory recovery, for example in university students. Memory is and will remain essential for learning. And indeed some studies show that entrusting nearly all of our knowledge and memories to the cloud could reduce our ability to remember.
Fortunately, there is also a positive aspect to all of this. Although some studies argue that this external delegation of our memory makes us dumber, in reality we are only changing our skills from being merely able to remember, to being able to more efficiently manage how we remember.
This process is called metacognition and is a global skill, fundamental for students, for example, when they have to plan what and how to study.
And we also know, thanks to documented and reliable studies, that external memories, including selfies, can help people with memory problems.
And yet, while photos can in some cases help people remember, it’s the quality of the memories that could be worse. Looking at an image of the past, we could remember a particular aspect, but perhaps at the expense of other information. One study showed that although photos helped people remember what they saw at an event, they also negatively interfere with remembering what was said.
The desire to represent images has always been present in man (the prehistoric man with his graffiti or the small child who, even before language, is able to express himself with drawing).
And the first image in any case is always that of himself (for the need to describe himself in his own life context) or to describe the other (s) (to differentiate the friend / enemy relationship). In particular, portraying in some way the person you are fond of, the mother, is for the child the way to keep it within himself, to memorize it, to have it always present.
A primary form of portrait or self-portrait can be the imprint left on a surface: the hand (the hands and feet of the stars immediately come to mind in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood), the full figure (the Shroud).
When we think of the human figure, the most immediate are the shadow or the reflection in the mirror.
In this regard Otto Rank (in The Double. The Meaning of the Double in Literature and Folklore) tells us:
the shadow, indivisible by man, becomes one of the first “objectifications ” of the human soul … all primitive populations believe that the soul of man is an exact copy of the body, recognized first of all in the shadows”
The depiction of the portrait is first of all linked to the desire to preserve one’s identity, not to lose it … we cannot fail to recall in this sense the funerary image (painted, sculpted, photographed) which basically “tries to hold back” the person through the its representation.
If the psychological function of the portrait or self-portrait is to safeguard the person, it must be pointed out that in reality the image is “fixed” at that moment because it may be an important moment (position reached or covered, marriage, desire to leave successive generations the image of oneself that one wants to pass on…)… but once the portrait is finished the person will change immediately afterwards, so the portrait is a paradox from this point of view: it preserves the image only of that specific moment.
All this is then particularly evident if we use photography and if it is an “important” photograph, we know how much the pose can betray the naturalness of the person: sometimes we do not even recognize ourselves in it and we see / feel different from how others. perceive.
The portrait and the emoziona transmission
The portrait, when the artist tries to give a representation consistent with what the person transmits, could show us particular aspects of the person portrayed that we had never noticed; on the other hand, art often tries to interpret reality, to transmit readings, interpretations of facts or, as in this case, of people, to free them from the incessant passage of time.
It immortalizes not so much the event, but our presence at the event which, consequently, is relegated to the background on which our image is drawn.
Today we are reflected in versions of ourselves built for the use and consumption of social media, where identity is determined by the sum of interests, friends, likes, emojis and clicks obsessively replicated on screens and keyboards.
It is in fact an exacerbated narcissism that postulates a continuous overexposure of the image (often trying to improve it with the devices that technology offers us).
Artist and model
At a first level, one might think of portraying a person in the most realistic way possible, but in fact two levels, always present, play in the portrait, which somehow make this search for verisimilitude impossible. On the one hand, those who want to be portrayed will try in some way to show themselves at their best, posing in the way they deem most appropriate, assuming an attitude and a look that they consider most appropriate to represent them and thereby preparing themselves “in a certain way” to be portrayed.
On the other hand, the artist, even if objectively “inhabited” by the desire to be as objective as possible, every time he finds himself in front of his model he will try to get to know him better in order to represent him in the most appropriate way, but with this, subtly, he will try to project oneself into the model to understand it more deeply and thus make its identity as much as possible; in this way, in reality, he moves away from a purely objective representation in favor of a personalized “reading” of the person to be portrayed.
Within certain limits we could say that the artist is constantly in the balance between the laws of physiognomy that he knows well, the commitment to respect them and the “interpretation” of the model as he portrays it and knows it because deep down he feels that the his work makes more sense.
