This article analyses the 1995 series Deslocamentos [Displacements] by Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz. In this work, the artist presents several photographs of press images that appear to show nothing at all. Here, Muniz prints empty squares and rectangles, adds captions and then manipulates them in order to give a sensation of ‘wear and tear.’ The article proposes that by ‘blocking’ the image’s content, and by emulating the way the media presents visual material, Deslocamentos underscores the emptying of the image’s value through specific forms of framing. By presenting this series of ‘empty images,’ Deslocamentos invites the spectator to think of how images appear or are distributed in regimes of visibility. The article puts forward the concept of the political economy of images as a framework to think of Muniz’s gesture and, more generally, the ways in which images accrue value in any given space of visibility. Images are reproducible, itinerant, entities, and given their contemporary profusion and the accelerated pace with which they circulate, any analysis of them should articulate singularity and difference to seriality and repetition. The concept of the political economy of images is provided to think through this articulation and to underscore the inextricable relation between frame, singularity, repetition and value.

本文分析了 1995 年巴西视觉艺术家 Vik Muniz 的Deslocamentos [Displacements] 系列。在这件作品中，艺术家展示了几张看似什么都没有的新闻图片。在这里，Muniz 打印出空白的正方形和长方形，添加说明文字，然后对其进行处理，以营造出一种“磨损和撕裂”的感觉。这篇文章提出，通过“屏蔽”图像的内容，并通过模仿媒体呈现视觉材料的方式，Deslocamentos通过特定的框架形式强调了图像价值的清空。通过展示这一系列“空洞的图像”，Deslocamentos邀请观众思考图像是如何在可见度范围内出现或分布的。这篇文章提出了图像政治经济学的概念，作为思考 Muniz 姿态的框架，更一般地说，图像在任何给定的可见空间中增值的方式。图像是可复制的、流动的、实体的，鉴于它们在当代的丰富性和它们流通的加快速度，对它们的任何分析都应该将奇异性和差异性与连续性和重复性联系起来。提供图像政治经济学的概念来思考这种表达，并强调框架、奇异性、重复和价值之间不可分割的关系。