The distorted charm of the bourgeoisie | The Economist

Each year the exhibition of the winning images of the World Press Photo is an opportunity to examine the deepest depths of the human soul, the ideologies that provoke genocide, the most abject behaviors that we are capable of and, in general, the bitter pain of our species.

This year this rule has been confirmed once again, and thus, we were able to appreciate in the sample the best images of the international press during 2020: overwhelming pictures, such as the hecatomb left behind by the Beirut explosion, in August, of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which ended up devastating a country already devastated by factious struggles and by the succession of failed governments.

In the exhibition that ends this Sunday at the Franz Mayer Museum, and which can be seen online at www.worldpressphoto.org, you can see, for example, the photos taken of Layla Taloo, a Jazidi woman covered from head to toe, including the hands, with the full burqa that she had to wear every day of the two and a half years that she lived enslaved in Iraq by the Islamic State. These images remind us that in the years that the “caliphate” lasted, slaves were sold for 50 dollars and children for 35 (about 3,500 slaves have been freed, but 2,900 are still missing).

This year the categories of images that have to do with the environment caused a special stir, for the obvious reason that we are increasingly affected by climate change. The shocking photo of the howler monkey that was charred in full motion by one of the fires that devastated entire areas of Brazil in 2020 stands out. This was of such intensity that even animals that move very quickly were trapped in the flames.

The drama of migrations in Italy and Greece; intolerance and harassment in Russia towards LGBT groups; the last hours of the terminally ill; animal abuse on pig farms in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain is the fourth largest exporter of pork) and, of course, the reality that marked the entire world in 2020: Covid-19. Everything is reflected here.

Every moment captures what happens on our planet and photographers are witnesses of history. And we can already guess what themes will be present in the 2022 exhibition (the brutal images of the Haitian migrants repressed by the United States border guard; the volcanic lava flooding houses in La Palma, Canary Islands; and without a doubt the situation of the thousands of people left to their own devices in the disastrous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan), but this time I do not want to dwell only on the many tragedies or the imminent dangers, but on other phenomena that were also shrewdly visualized by the various photographers, as the decline of certain groups of wealthy classes in developed countries.

This is the case of the so-called “Reborn” dolls, hyper-realistic plastic babies that seem alive at first glance, and that are “adopted”, or “lighted” by people who cannot conceive or who have lost a baby. They are made from birthmarks, veins, implanted hair, pores, tears and saliva. There are some that can reproduce the beating of a heart, breathing or sucking, as a baby would in real life, and even come with a perfume that simulates the smell of a newborn.

They are delivered with a “birth” certificate and, apart from the intention of teaching medical students to care for children, and the supposed benefit to people with dementia, one cannot help but wonder why anyone would want to order and “care for ” to a reborn. The cards at the bottom of the photographs report that many people do so after suffering from empty nest syndrome, and use them as surrogate children. Women (and certain men too) literally give “love” to a piece of plastic, giving it all the care, changing its clothes and buying toys for it.

The photographer, Karolina Jonderko, exposed the motivation of each woman portrayed to have a reborn, "as a means of coping with loss or anxiety", but one cannot get it out of one's mind, after seeing these disturbing images of supposed mothers cooing their so-called children, or walking them in strollers, or even taking them to the hospital, that we are facing a bizarre and twisted phenomenon, typical of a hyper-consumer society in which everything can be bought, even babies, even if they are made of silicone, in an attempt to alleviate an undeniable emptiness that they are unable to face in any other way and to live false lives in order to avoid any confrontation with pain.

Also in Poland, another photographer, Natalia Kepesz, portrayed the activities of militarized camps in which children learn survival tactics in extreme conditions, as well as firing compressed air machine guns or throwing substitutes for grenades. In the popularity of these "training camps" one can see the fruit of the nationalism and jingoism that prevails in Poland after the rise to power of the extreme right-wing Law and Justice party (hardly opposed by the European institutions for its tendency to authoritarianism and the homophobia).

In these camps, children and adolescents simulate events in which they have to wear gas masks in the face of alleged attacks with chemical weapons or face "terrorist attacks" with machine guns. They are trained, then, in the cult of weapons. And it is precisely this idolatry that is shown in the work of another photographer, Gabriele Galimberti, in the country where this frenzy reaches its most insane heights: the United States.

Among his signatures we see a citizen of Schriever, Louisiana, Torrell Jasper, who shows off his dozens of weapons, including flamethrowers capable of sending deadly blasts up to six meters, which Jasper proudly fires on camera. We also observe Robert Baldwin, in the comfort of his home, where he built a security camera, a kind of bunker, and who confessed to the photographer that it was his father who gave him his first rifle, a 22 caliber, when he was six years.

Galimberti's show reflects a world in turmoil: people posing with beaming smiles with their young children, before dozens of AK-47s in their homes. All this product of delusion, paranoia and mass hysteria, of course, but also of an outrageously opulent society, which does not hesitate to collect literally hundreds of weapons for military use while, on the one hand, migrants crowd to search for a job where they can earn a few dollars and, on the other, indiscriminate attacks against civilians increase (in 2020 alone there were 633 mass shootings in the United States).

We stare in awe at the little girl Danyela D'Angelo's collection of almost a thousand guns, which she displays for her photo in the private bunker her family built for her in Arizona. Danyela, who poses holding a machine gun, fires about 3,000 bullets a month, and all that "inheritance" will be hers when she comes of age, according to the trust she has in her name. The photographer closes his collection with the image of Will Renke, from South Carolina, who buys a gun every two weeks, and with the family photo of the pious pastor Parker Fawbush, from Indiana, who has covered the city with pistols and assault weapons. field in which his little children play: everything ready for the photo, oh, and of course, in the background of the image, the church he runs.