Symbols of Hell: Images of nowhere and somewhere

Abstract

This paper shows the winning photographs of the World Press Photo of the Year in the past 10 years regarding them as collective imagistic manifestations. All they show violence and suffering, chaos and destruction, symbolizing hell. We conclude that contemporary Western imaginary by switching to a heavily heroic, aggressive, competitive form creates, on the other hand, euphemistic images where life and death converge towards the feminine. Nevertheless, this game of extremes is refused, the figurative sense of the images is denied and they are overloaded with literally sense, destroying the anthropological trajectory where the symbolic image is formed. This results in an annihilation of symbolic play and the emergence of a post-image.