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“Comunicattive” is a Bologna-based communications agency that has been operating from a gender perspective for 20 years, creating campaigns against the racist, sexist, ableist, and homolesbotransphobic stereotypes conveyed by the media and its institutions.
On November 5, it launched an ambitious new project, Fotonica, an image bank that represents women, migrants, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community in an authentic, original, and pluralistic way.
Dozens of carefully selected photographs, illustrations, and graphic representations are now available, giving voice and visibility to individuals who are usually targets of discrimination and excluded from traditional channels.
The goal is now to share these images with newspapers, news websites, public bodies, advertising agencies, and publishing houses, with the aim of building a different narrative about the world and triggering radical cultural and social change that is expressed not only through words.
Images play a fundamental role in perpetuating and reinforcing prejudice and stereotypes. And so choosing images wisely can help to deconstruct and combat them, especially considering that the images generally resorted to in diversity representation are cookie-cutter photos that often simplify and generalize erroneous, distorted, and biased opinions about said diversity.
How to tell the story of gender-based violence?
We are all familiar with the victim-blaming and guilt-inducing images used daily in the media when it comes to gender-based violence. In most cases, the media show a slim, white young woman protecting herself with one hand, crouched in a corner, covered in bruises, and wearing tattered clothes.
Images play a fundamental role in perpetuating and reinforcing prejudice and stereotypes. And so choosing images wisely can help to deconstruct and combat them.
Samantha Cavicchi, Elisa Coco, Stefania Guidi, and Lucia Jorini, the four members of Comunicattive, explain that in resorting to these types of images, the media commits two errors: first, they convey the idea that the young woman cannot escape the abusive dynamic, and second, they imply that only physical violence exists, excluding all the other equally dangerous and widespread forms of violence—psychological, economic, digital, and sexual.
“We want images that place the woman at the center of a network of help and support, images that make the woman the protagonist reacting proudly in the face of violence or that show the presence of others listening to her experiences,” reads a note, which also specifies that an essential point to emphasize is that these women must not feel fragile or alone.
“That’s why,” the authors add, “we need photos, illustrations, and graphic designs representing a multitude of subjects and not only centered around white, heterosexual, young, able-bodied women. We also need racialized, disabled, fat, lesbian, and transgender women.”
Moreover, anyone with experience in this field can contribute to this visual archive, “by prioritizing photos of groups and communities that convey the idea of a welcoming and supportive network, and by highlighting "proud portraits" of all those who stand against violence rather than endure it.” This sends a message of strength and confidence. When portraying the perpetrators of violence, it is also essential to avoid stereotypes that tend to show aggressors as monsters or anonymous characters seized by sudden anger, as aggressors in most cases are parents or partners.
Under-representation of the LGBTQIA+ community
Non-binary, homosexual, or transgender people are very often completely absent from media and institutional communications—or they are represented in distorted or stereotypical images that further exacerbate the discrimination they suffer.
In order to represent them in a more authentic, respectful, and pluralistic way, Fotonica collects photos and illustrations of real people’s faces and bodies, individually or in groups, and “not those of people pretending to be LGBTQIA+ or people copying heteronormative models for rainbow cliches (1).” It is necessary not only to give space to those who manage to express their subjectivity but also to restore the sense of community and mutual support that characterizes this world by recounting the normality of everyday life.
“We want bodies that are different from the ones we see in glossy magazines and TV commercials and on websites,” the call states. “We want them fat, disabled, racialized, and proud. We want all the colors, not just those of the rainbow.”
Every non-conforming body suffers, every day, the deleterious effects of reductive representations that the shared norm aims to impose on all women.
Pietism, mistrust, sexual objectification, social exclusion, and stigmatization are all ways to penalize these subjectivities, observed and described essentially through a distorting, male prism, producing content aimed at an equally male, white, heterosexual, cis, and able-bodied audience.
For Fotonica, every photo we see should make the viewer think of what it shows and what it excludes. What emotions does it trigger? What chain reactions is it capable of producing?
