At

Prada

Frames,

Alfredo

Jaar

spoke

about

images

without

showing

a

single

one

Alfredo Jaar has come to believe that the photograph lies. Not through manipulation or bad faith, but through the irreducible distance between the person who lives inside a reality and the person who arrives to document it. That distance — geographical, cultural, historical, existential — cannot be closed by proximity, technique, or good intention. It can only be acknowledged. And the acknowledgment, when it is serious, changes everything about how an image is made, withheld, or destroyed.

This is the argument at the center of Jaar’s practice, and it surfaces with particular clarity at Images and Political Imagination, a panel held as part of Prada Frames — Prada’s annual cultural program, curated this year by Formafantasma — in the Sacrestia Nuova of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where Jaar appeared alongside Alice Rawsthorn and Jonas Staal. Political imagination, for Jaar, is not a metaphor. It is the faculty that the image, when it works, is supposed to activate — and the one that its failure most consistently destroys. Jaar speaks at length about photographs. He shows none. The choice is not incidental. It is, as with every formal decision in his work, a thesis.