RAPPRESENTAZIONI DELLA CITTÀ: IMMAGINI DI STOCK E ANESTETIZZAZIONE DEL PAESAGGIO

In this article, the authors explore the link between the city and its images. Their hypothesis is that images of the city do not merely have a cosmetic function but contribute to the experience of the city itself, as well as to its reality. The article focuses mainly on stock images of the city, those available on the websites of stock agencies such as Getty Images and Shutterstock. Their thesis is that these images have an anesthetizing effect on the imaginaries, and hence expectations, about the city. The article is divided into three sections. In the first section, the authors propose a state of the art of the existing literature on stock images, insisting on the relationship between their material and symbolic dimensions. In the second section, they explore the link between the city and its images by resorting to the notion of urban landscape. In the third section, they consider the specific case of the city of Turin. Specifically, they conduct a socio-semiotic analysis on the first 100 images resulting from the search “Torino OR Turin” on the search engine of the microstock agency Shutterstock. In the conclusion, the authors refer to the concept of «distribution of the sensible» (Rancière 2000) to introduce their own notion of “anaesthetics”, that is, an anesthetizing aesthetic that characterize, according to them, these visual representations of the city