A “Flood of images”. Notes on the fate of the “figure seen from behind” in the Digital Career Stories by the UniMC team

The paper analyses the way in which UniMC students have used personal photos for the preparation of their Digital Career Stories during a workshop held in Macerata in January 2022. The phrase “flood of images” expresses the freedom with which students have used numerous photographs taken during their leisure time and travels. In this “flood of images” we can notice a predominant presence of a powerful image, which is recurrent in almost all the stories: it is based on the theme of a human being seen from behind, showing his/her back to the observer. In some images the protagonist (or the protagonists) is looking at an amazing landscape, while in other cases he/she is admiring a framed picture, a work of art in a museum. The figure of a human being seen from behind could be an effect of the significant impact of some Friedrich’s paintings (also in the European handbook of general history, literature, and art history). Within the frame of the “visual studies” (and using Mitchell, Freedberg, Lester and Belting categories), the paper deals with a singular case of the “power of images”.