Diaries Without Padlocks. Photographic Writing of the Obscene in Social Networks, Art and Fashion

The camera, after its integration into smartphones, is perhaps the best medium to sum up the processes of transformation sparked at the turn of the millennium by the Digital Turn: by the revolution in communications technology and by the prominence of the Internet as a channel for the distribution of images. They are the very same processes of transformation that have determined the delineation of the “transparent society”, constantly engaged in unveiling and publicly revealing the private sphere, which in the process has lost its dimension of secrecy. Indeed today, through the transparent glass of a smartphone, everything imposes itself on our gaze, leading to the surfacing of the “obscenity of the too visible” as theorised by Jean Baudrillard. And it is precisely from the French philosopher’s reinterpretation of a concept that is no longer strictly tied to the sexual sphere that the reconnaissance at the core of this paper intends to start. A reconnaissance of the territory of photography that, following the coordinates of the obscene, moves across already mapped places and suggests new unexplored routes. Having become a conceptual category, it can indeed be used as an instrument for understanding the languages and poetics of photography in social networks, art and fashion. An instrument to connect all those authors who, through autobiographical image narrations, have brought to centre stage that which should have remained hidden or maybe preserved in a secret diary, imposing on our gaze that “brothel without walls” that, as Marshall McLuhan has taught us, is nothing else but the world in the photographic age.