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

Abstract

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.