The Public Life of Images: Towards a Social Ecology of the Urban Gaze. The example of Bologna’s Sacrario dei Partigiani

Résumé 0

To investigate the active presence of images in urban public places, this article argues for the possibility of a social ecological perspective, revisiting the tradition of human ecology introduced by Chicago sociologists and social psychologists a century ago. Confronting this intellectual heritage to contributions of visual, cultural and memory studies, I propose to consider the ecological framing of urban experience as a method for investigating the public life of images. This approach consists in studying the perceptual environments, material devices and social activities that maintain a living relationship with public images in cities. To illustrate the proposal, the article examines a concrete example, the photographic portraits of the Sacrario dei Partigiani in Bologna (Italy), through personal observation and photographs. A third section of the text expands the scope of inquiry, in order to experiment with the social ecological approach: it addresses the contemporary flooding of advertising and mobile images in contemporary urban situations.