I nvisible people surround us. These are the beg- gars, street vendors, gypsies, pickpockets, restau- rant waiters, and street performers that occupy the periphery of our consciousness. The “invisibles” feed us, clean our rooms, park our cars, entertain and even hustle us. For the past three months, while teaching a college course on signs and symbols in Florence, Italy, I have become interested in the so- ciological, psychological, and cultural phenomena of “invisible” people from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. As I observed and recorded the interaction between the “invisibles” and the thousands of tourists that flood the plaza around Filippo Brunelleschi's dome or “Duomo”, I became aware of how I’ve practiced a process of seeing that normalizes the other - people I routinely overlook. 12 October 2014, Florence, Italy There’s a gaggle of Japanese tourists marching in unison out in front of the Duomo today as a guide waves a plastic flower wand about like a baton so that the group doesn’t get lost in a pothole. A tour- ist’s neck bends like a swan before breaking to gaze at the more than 4 million bricks holding together Brunelleschi’s teapot. There are no Italians here real- ly; a couple of police officers and some mad cyclists dodging tourists at break-neck speed. There’s a women, a gypsy perhaps, who spends her day doubled-over on the sidewalk of Via Cavour hop- ing that someone will notice her. Only a few do. The cup is still empty an hour later. Nearly 30 percent of Italy's yearly income comes from tourism - more than 30 billion Euros a year. Not so coincidentally, there are more than 2,000 museums in Italy and 72 of them are in Florence. The Italy I have come to know is wrapped in plastic and packaged to sell on street corners by new arrivals from Pakistan or Africa. Each year more than 30 million tourists from all over the world come to Italy on vacation. That means one tourist per every two and one half Italians. I separate meaning from experience by looking at and not truly seeing the other. I watched passively an exchange between two Ger- man tourists and a gypsy who pressed an empty plastic cup into their map as she mumbled some- thing unintelligible to them. The tourists smiled at first, shaking off the advances. After about one min- ute, one of the tourists looked down at the woman, turned her head, smiled again, folded the map, and walked away. In this case, symbolic consciousness can be how we use abstract ideas or concepts such as charity or compassion to label reality. THE INVISIBLES: A PHOTO ESSAY
Transcript
Invisible people surround us. These are the beg-gars, street vendors, gypsies, pickpockets, restau-rant waiters, and street performers that occupy the periphery of our consciousness. The “invisibles”
feed us, clean our rooms, park our cars, entertain and even hustle us. For the past three months, while teaching a college course on signs and symbols in Florence, Italy, I have become interested in the so-ciological, psychological, and cultural phenomena of “invisible” people from the perspective of symbolic interactionism.
As I observed and recorded the interaction between the “invisibles” and the thousands of tourists that flood the plaza around Filippo Brunelleschi's dome or “Duomo”, I became aware of how I’ve practiced a process of seeing that normalizes the other - people I routinely overlook.
12 October 2014, Florence, Italy
There’s a gaggle of Japanese tourists marching in unison out in front of the Duomo today as a guide waves a plastic flower wand about like a baton so that the group doesn’t get lost in a pothole. A tour-ist’s neck bends like a swan before breaking to gaze at the more than 4 million bricks holding together Brunelleschi’s teapot. There are no Italians here real-ly; a couple of police officers and some mad cyclists dodging tourists at break-neck speed.
There’s a women, a gypsy perhaps, who spends her day doubled-over on the sidewalk of Via Cavour hop-ing that someone will notice her. Only a few do. The cup is still empty an hour later. Nearly 30 percent of Italy's yearly income comes from tourism - more than 30 billion Euros a year. Not so coincidentally, there are more than 2,000 museums in Italy and 72 of them are in Florence. The Italy I have come to know is wrapped in plastic and packaged to sell on street corners by new arrivals from Pakistan or Africa. Each year more than 30 million tourists from all over the world come to Italy on vacation. That means one tourist per every two and one half Italians.
I separate meaning from experience by looking at and not truly seeing the other.
I watched passively an exchange between two Ger-man tourists and a gypsy who pressed an empty plastic cup into their map as she mumbled some-thing unintelligible to them. The tourists smiled at first, shaking off the advances. After about one min-ute, one of the tourists looked down at the woman, turned her head, smiled again, folded the map, and walked away. In this case, symbolic consciousness can be how we use abstract ideas or concepts such as charity or compassion to label reality.
THE INVISIBLES: A PHOTO ESSAY
The symbolic message is fairly obvious – the tourists, aware of the gypsy’s presence, choose to ignore her not out of rudeness but out of indifference–––. Assa-goli (1969) suggests, “The current criterion of normal-ity is generally considered to be represented by the average man who observes the social conventions of the environment in which he lives-in other words, one who is a conformist.” From this perspective, it may seem normal to overlook the gypsy or a street vendor if the behavior doesn’t conform to our expectation. The symbolic interaction that emerges between the gypsy and the tourists demonstrates a tension be-tween the expectations of the gypsy and any sense of obligation from the tourists (Goffman, 1959). In this situation, the gypsy’s persuasive practice in begging for money makes it hard for her to be “under-seen” or “over-looked.” Nevertheless, the symbolic meaning of the gypsy resonates within me. The gypsy resides in the shadows of my interior life, hidden from the pretense of my social self. For Shalit, “As a negative of our ego-ideal and the socially adjusted persona, the shadowy image of the beggar abides in our soul, as if without identity. Without a persona, there can be no pretension.”
Ultimately, a camera, if pointed in the right direction, in the right light, and focused just so, can capture the very nature of what it means to be human - the door-way to the afterworld - the élan vital - the human soul. In this spirit, what is even more remarkable, is that this box of metal and glass, when given instructions can make the invisible, visible. Yet, we remain visually ambivalent to anything other than the objects of de-sire or the presence of danger.
Florence, Italy . David on camera
Frederick Franck observes, “The glaring contrast be-tween seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing.”
Memory is stitched together by a millions of mo-ments. Discrimination is an act of memory and past experience combined. Pictures, our surrogate mem-ory, reveal relationships – subject and photographer, light and camera, what is seen and what we fix in time.
Thomas Merton said, “In modern life our senses are so constantly bombarded with stimulation from every side that unless we developed a hind of protective insensibility we would go crazy….”
Florence, Italy . David for sale
Dennis Dunleavy teaches visual communication at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. This essay was produced during a semester abroad in Italy where he taught on semiotics: signs and symbols. Dr. Dunleavy can be contacted at [email protected]
