I posted in the OCA Forum https://discuss.oca-student.com/t/can-childhood-memory-exercise/5930/4I I will try not to ramble just thought I would share it also feed backs to much of CAN. So I have being thinking about what I will do (construct) for Childhood memory….I know work first think later but I can’t help. So it will be a self portrait of me crying, I remember crying a lot in the beginning of the 80’s I hated! junior school. This trigger a memory of the tacky popular wall art of the late 70’s early 80’s - print of the “Crying Boy” painting. I remember seeing on the wall of what seemed everywhere, I remember the stories (urban legend) about the “curse of the crying boy” and how the prints would survive house fires unscathed, it was true houses burnt to the ground but the painting were treated in fire resistant coating and fell face down and remained untouched. So I will look to pay homage to the “Crying Boy” has it fits both internal and has a external childhood memory.
So I decided to research the painting, the artist of the work (a series of 60 ish paints) was Giovanni Bragolin an italian painter. His work was mass produced and was popular in the 70’s and 80’s but I couldn’t really find much on the net which mainly comprise of the urban legend. But I did a net search “Crying Boy in Visual Culture” in the hope that maybe this tacky mass reproduce was something else other than tacky. It came back with something I found very interest. A book called “Visual Culture In The Middle East: Rhetoric Of The Image” published in 2013. Talks of the very same “Crying Boy” print in a Chapter “The Muslim Crying Boy In Turkey” which was also popular in the 70’s and 80’s in Turkish culture, European image appropriated into Islamic context (suffering, pain, distress, political and religious) - simplified because I have not read the whole book in detail nor do I have detailed knowledge of Islamic culture. The book was written in 2013 one year after the beginning of the syrian civil war and three years for the iconic Aleppo child in the ambulance image. There has been questions over the authenticity of this image and consider that Aleppo is very close to the border of Turkey and that some rebels are turkish backed, that the photographer (Mahmoud Raslan) was described as a media activist. Is “The Crying Boy” so culturally important it has become another urban myth in child in the ambulance? Yes nobody can deny the horrific impact on people there nor deny the civil war but is the image based on a staged lie to drive home a truth. I think it is.
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