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“The President’s speech” is the eight story of the volume “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”. The case described by Oliver Sacks came from the direct observation of the general hilarity caused in patients by a speech (intentionally strong, rhetorical and emotional) of the President of the United States at that time, Ronald Reagan. The Patients suffered from Aphasia. These individuals are able to understand verbal communication only when perceived as a whole thanks to an exasperated skill at grasping the deeper feelings of expressiveness, observing mimicry, tone of voice down to the slightest inflections. If you speak to these patients with an inexpressive, monotonous tone (like an artificial voice) they are absolutely unable make any sense because words to an aphasic person are empty incomprehensible boxes. This “formal” inability tends by contrast to develop hypersensitivity. A speaker’s credibility is immediately found out by the aphasic patient because paying no attention to words they cannot be plagiarised or overwhelmed by them. Like no one else aphasic people perceive the sincerity of a person and what they say simply because they can mercilessly analyse the correspondence between what a person really is and how they wish to appear, between what they say and what they think.. Reagan’s rhetoric, the hypocrisy, the insincere emphasis in his moral references, his whole persona therefore had no credibility and consequently the effect created was comic. I took this photograph in March 2002 at the Alberoni bathing establishment on the Lido of Venice. I was trying to think of what would happen if this amazing skill of Aphasic patients to comprehend the world emotionally, overcoming the snares of language and speakers’ intentions, could be applied to the world of images. Besides a different and perhaps contradictory emotional emphasis there would also be a different and unusual perceptive emphasis. Therefore even if a tree is essentially its foliage from a visual point of view, it has much greater importance than the trunk in an image, it should be the trunk that dominates the image perceptively. A way of physically feeling with the eyes, reversing the tonal values to see the real consistency of an object, giving the object its weight and not its form and extension. |