Cuando despertó el elefante todavía estaba ahí.

Nueva publicación del equipo Irudi Estudios de la imagen del Área de Antropología Visual de la UBA.

Titulo: Cuando despertó el elefante todavía estaba ahí. La imagen del Rey en la cultura visual 2.0.
Authors

Ander Gondra Aguirre
PhD. Marina Gutiérrez De Angelis
Gorka López de Munain
Luis Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez

Sinopsis del libro

Can images provoke an abdication? Do they have the power to establish or overthrow monarchies through their existence and dissemination? Images are powerful artifacts, difficult to handle and capable of inspiring the most diverse reactions in people. Throughout history, rulers, perfectly aware of this, have managed to master the production of a visual culture skillfully constructed to modulate thought, create wars or unite a nation. However, in the era of Visual Culture 2.0, the rules of the game have changed and citizens can produce, distribute and consume photographs generating reactions never before imagined. The latest generation of mobile phones or smartphones, social networks, the logic of Web 2.0, instant messaging applications, etc., draw the broadest lines of new times in which the image takes on a prominent place.

Under these premises, this book will delve into the complex relationship that has always linked images to the monarchy. Taking as a starting point the famous photograph of King Juan Carlos I hunting in Botswana, an investigation is initiated in which the past and the present are intertwined, showing the survival of the symbolic gestures that define royalty. As art historian Hans Belting would say, “images are nomads of their media”, jumping from one to another through time and adopting a different form in each case to define a visual genealogy that reaches to our days. This unique iconographic atlas will reveal many of the controversies that have arisen around this institution in the form of satires, defamations, iconoclasms, censorship… and that today question its legitimacy in a world dominated by digital images.