by Farnaz Farahi.
When I arrived in Italy, I was nineteen, but I felt myself like a newborn. I didn’t understand the language, I didn’t know anyone, I did lose my identity. I had only two small black-and-white photographs with me: the faces of my mother and father torn out from old driver’s licenses. Those images were my refuge and my roots, my nourishment during those days of disorientation. Then, one day, my wallet was stolen. I had no money, but I lost those photos. It was an internal rip. In that moment, I understood that an image can be more powerful: it contains memory, affection, hope.
Images help us to remember, reminisce, communicate, imagine. They offer continuity when everything seems fragmented. Arranging photographs – of the past, the present, and the future I aspired to – restored order. The images spoke for me, when I searched for words I didn’t possess yet.
Today, I use them in educational and training contexts. Photographs can open dialogues, evoke emotions, construct meanings. They are bridges between cultures, languages, and experiences. They not only represent, but generate: new ideas, new relationships, new visions. “Seeing is body,” I told myself, and the body can feel what the eyes cannot see.
Photography, as an artistic expression, has a power that goes beyond representation. Its primary function is psychological-existential, because it allows us to appropriate it, to bring it to ourselves and within ourselves. It has a cognitive function, because it deepens knowledge and observation; a technical function, as skill; a social function, in its ability to reflect, to criticize, denounce, and transform society. It has a historical and cultural function, because each photograph loads different meanings depending on time and context. And finally, it possesses a utopian function: it opens up to imagined, desired worlds that do not exist yet. Photography does not simply document, but announces new possibilities of experience.
I had the opportunity to deepen the relationship between photography and pedagogy, and their connection to aesthetics. The power of beauty, already recognized by authors such as Schiller, Dewey, Proust, Bloch, Heidegger, Marcuse, Gadamer, and Adorno, reminds us that art can be a form of salvation.
Through aesthetic education, we can take care of ourselves. Receiving an artwork activates an internal dialogue, refines our experiences, and directs our gaze on the world. Art educates because it transforms us. In the silence between us and the image, a space of intimacy, freedom, and awareness is born.
Placing yourself as the subject of an image is a powerful act: we express who we are, the places we inhabit, the people and actions we love. It’s a way to know ourselves and to be known, to clarify who we are and to share our perspective on the world with others.
As Jerome Bruner states: “The self is constructed becoming its own interpreter, the narrator of its own experience.” In this way, visual storytelling is a form of mutual understanding creating authentic bridges between people and cultures.