Omayra: reflections on face, photography and their political issues

Abstract

This article proposes some re ections on the girl Omayra Sanchez’s photograph to reveal how photojournalistic image can constitute someone’s face by making it subject to our glance. The printed face on the photographic surface makes the stranger appear and brings out the place of communication and reciprocity. At the same time, the politics of image can reveal a “being common”, or an uncommon, or a piece of someone else that is not easy to apprehend, not translatable into communication. In a threefold session, this article seeks to understand how that image shows us the other’s place transformed by the promise of my place, assuming an aesthetic, ethical, and political aspect. Opening, passage and interdiction compose the movements of the intermittent, productive process of subjectifying glances and gestures.