Myopia

With Myopia Hillie de Rooij shows us that we do not simply look at pictures. There are rules and codes involved that affect the way we look at images of the world around us. And this surely counts for images of places we have never been before. The journalistic codes demands a certain degree of stability. Stability provided by familiar foundations such as vocabulary, perspectives and subject matter. We also use our memory to interpret images. But in search of recognition we leave ourselves stuck in clichés. With Myopia De Rooij comments on this. She plays a game with the codes used to represent Africa in the European media. She wants to make the viewer aware of these codes to see that we build on the cliché that we know of Africa. Myopia tells us nothing about Africa, but all about Europe’s way of seeing it.