There are, of course, extreme examples of stress where one can almost empathise with the suicide. There is a photograph from the 1930s where the American photographer was just walking the street and sensed something and took a picture. The picture was of a woman just before she hit the sidewalk, falling onto her back amidst a few passing pedestrians. When you see a picture like that it is surreal. Quiet. A still life. And you are detached from it because it is black and white, and yet held in it, just for your imagination and reason to look closely, is a terrible, tragic moment of loneliness and despair.
Such is the hold of the visual arts that we can all point to photographs of momentous and private moments that have struck our memories so forcibly they remain with us all our lives. In the same way we all act as cameras, as with that brilliant title by Christopher Isherwood, ‘I am a Camera’, but not everything we see is worth while us retaining. But everything we see, is seen and maybe what we find irrelevant others find interesting.
And today press journalism suggests to us what they find interesting we should find interesting. And so despair has become a show.
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