CFP — REVELAR 6 (2021) The Photographer — deadline extension May 31!

2018

The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture is a seminal reference source for the ever-changing field of photography. Comprising an impressive range of essays and interviews by experts and scholars from across the globe, this book examines the medium’s history, its central issues and emerging trends, and its much-discussed future. The collected essays and interviews explore the current debates surrounding the photograph as object, art, document, propaganda, truth, selling tool, and universal language; the perception of photography archives as burdens, rather than treasures; the continual technological development reshaping the field; photography as a tool of representation and control, and more. One of the most comprehensive volumes of its kind, this companion is essential reading for photographers and historians alike.

Photography and Its Shadow, 2020

In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medium in the first few decades after its invention, it was already clear to both enthusiasts and detractors that the new image-making process was poised to radically alter human experience. Today, a hundred and eighty years after its inception, photography has established itself as the regulating standard for seeing and picturing, remembering and imagining, and, significantly, for mediating relations between ourselves and others. It is now so intimately intertwined within our ordinary routines that we cannot begin to imagine our everyday lives without it. Photography has become an intrinsic condition of the human, a condition that—with Heidegger in mind—may be termed “an Existential.” And yet, photography’s rootedness in the ordinary is so deep that its existential dimension also typically hides from us, challenging us to find a vantage point as well as a philosophical language for describing its pervasive presence. The book thus lays the groundwork for a philosophical interpretation of the changing condition of photography in the twenty-first century. It should be understood as a prolegomenon—not the kind of wide-ranging Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics we know from Kant and the history of philosophy, but one that is more narrowly construed, concentrating on a specific metaphysical problem: an introduction to a future metaphysics of the image or to a future ontology of the visual. The term “future” applies here, as it does in Kant, to invite further elaborations of a preliminary ontological framework; but, in contrast to Kant, it also serves to acknowledge and address the ever-changing character of the phenomenon under investigation and, specifically, the fact that as the visual changes, it generates new possibilities for the future of the image. Photography, as Hans Belting reminds us, constitutes only “a short episode in the old history of representation.” The hegemony of the photographic is a short, and likely, a passing chapter in our relationship with images. Yet, as it is caught between “today and tomorrow,” photography also provides an opportune framework for rethinking the condition of the visual image in its movement toward the future, a future for which we are responsible, since its trajectory is determined by our present age.

Medien & Zeit, 1994

Photographies, 2019

Disturbingly, one important constituent within the photographic habitus has remained conspicuously absent from most discussions in what has come to be called Post-Photography. This particular, which since the nineteenth century has routinely been considered a key stage in the photographic workflow, is the human photographer. Therefore, this article delineates the presence of the human photographer in photography, its first appearances, its rise to prominence and its subsequent fall. In doing so, it attempts to explain how we taught ourselves to think of photography as a human-centric form of art-making and whether we ought to continue thinking of it as such. It begins with historical accounts of photography’s ‘machinism’, it then discusses modernist accounts of photography as an act of artistic ingenuity, followed by several modalities that have recently become available through digital and networked technologies. The article concludes with an alternate account of photography today and the likely place of both human photographer and viewer within it in the foreseeable future.

Lucia Moholy between Photography and Life, 2012

The book A Hundred Years of Photography 1839-1939 sums up Lucia Moholy's whole critical experience of the history of photography and theory of the image. The brief text was published by Penguin as a Pelican Special shortly before World War II to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Daguerre's invention. This rare text, one of the first histories of photography by a woman, together with the fundamental 1936 essay La Photographie en France au dixneuvième siècle by Gisèle Freund , deals with the subject by articulating different levels of interpretation: the symbolic, decisive for understanding the first hundred years of photography, from its invention to its impetuous break into modernity, and the technicalscientific, which emphasizes the importance of the whole process of creating images down to the discovery of the reality hidden behind the appearances of the visible world. The purpose of the book, as a popular, scholarly pocket-sized edition, was direct and practical: to make known the technical, historical, social and economic essentials of photography. The author explained that the text was not written "to replace any of those previously published, but because it was felt that at the age of a hundred, which, by now, photography has reached, it may be worth while to give a thought not only to the achievements of photography as such, but to the part it has played by mutual give and take throughout these hundred years in the life of man and society." 1 The distinctive quality of the book lies in the author's vision. Like Gisèle Freund, she focuses on the social context of the medium, backed up by a broad knowledge of art history. Her vision also emerges in many details of the treatment that bring out eccentric and original views. In twenty-eight short chapters she presents objectives and areas of development. In the opening chapters the reader is struck by the breadth of her treatment, the inclusion of large historical and scientific areas, for the most part overlooked by photography historians of the time. At the beginning of the second chapter, Lucia says explicitly, "Every art has its technique," 2 and immediately adds: "This does not imply that painting and photography have been completely dependent on each other. It does not mean that painting and photography are two sides of the same thing. They are, on the contrary, independent, each of them evolving on the basis of their own laws. But they are subjected to similar forces from the world outside, and also to their mutual interaction." 3 Beginning in 1839, between beauty and truth, appearance and reality, creation and contemplation, a new current was created, a dialectic that drove the philosophies of art to question themselves on the relations between artistic experience and the new medium. Lucia Moholy accepts the challenge by trying to show how the practice of art and that of photography, apparently so different, evoke each other and generate a history that is entwined with the history of mankind. Evoking the major Western philosophies, from Aristotle and Paracelsus to contemporary theories of art, Lucia explains how every great artwork entails an essential relationship 41 Il libro Cento anni di fotografia. 1839-1939 sintetizza l'intera esperienza critica di Lucia Moholy nel campo della storia della fotografia e della teoria dell'immagine. Il breve testo, che trova posto nella serie "Pellican Special" della casa editrice Penguin, viene pubblicato poco prima dell'inizio della Seconda guerra mondiale, per commemorare il centesimo anniversario dell'invenzione di Daguerre. Questo raro testo, una delle prime storie della fotografia vergate da una penna femminile -insieme al fondamentale saggio del 1936 La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle di Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) -affronta l'argomento articolandolo tramite piani di lettura differenti: quello simbolico, determinante per comprendere i primi cento anni della fotografia, dall'invenzione al suo impetuoso irrompere nella modernità; quello tecnico-scientifico, nel quale viene sottolineata l'importanza dell'intero processo di creazione di immagini fino alla scoperta delle realtà nascoste dietro le apparenze del mondo visibile. Lo scopo del libro, in quanto tascabile scientifico-popolare, è diretto e pratico: far conoscere la fotografia nei suoi essenziali aspetti tecnici, storici, sociali ed economici. L'autrice stessa spiega come il testo non sia stato scritto "per sostituire i libri precedentemente pubblicati ma perché ci si è accorti, dopo cento anni di storia della fotografia, che valeva la pena di dedicare un pensiero non solo ai traguardi raggiunti dalla fotografia, ma al ruolo che essa ha giocato nel reciproco dare e avere, attraverso questi cento anni nella vita dell'uomo e della società" 1 . La particolarità dell'opera consiste nella visione dell'autrice, che si concentra, così come accade in Gisèle Freund, sul contesto sociale del mezzo, sostenuta da un'ampia conoscenza storico-artistica, così come in numerosi dettagli della trattazione vengono rivelati punti di vista eccentrici e originali. In ventotto brevi capitoli vengono indicati traguardi e settori di sviluppo. Nei primi capitoli colpisce l'ampiezza della trattazione, l'inclusione dei grandi ambiti storicoscientifici, per la maggior parte tralasciati degli storici della fotografia dell'epoca. All'inizio del secondo capitolo, Lucia mette in chiaro: "Ogni arte ha la sua tecnica" 2 . E subito aggiunge: "Questo non implica che pittura e fotografia siano state completamente interdipendenti. Non significa che pittura e fotografia siano due facce della stessa medaglia. Esse sono, al contrario, indipendenti e mutano sulla base delle loro stesse regole. Sono però soggette a forze simili provenienti dal mondo esterno, e anche alle loro vicendevoli interazioni" 3 . Dal 1839 tra bellezza e verità, parvenza e realtà, creazione e contemplazione si è creata una nuova tensione, una dialettica che ha spinto le filosofie dell'arte a interrogarsi sul rapporto dell'esperienza artistica con il nuovo medium. Lucia Moholy raccoglie la sfida cercando di mostrare come la pratica artistica e quella fotografica, in apparenza così eterogenee, si richiamino l'un l'altra dando vita a una storia che si intreccia con la storia dell'uomo. Rievocando le principali filosofie occidentali, da Aristotele e Paracelso alle teorie artistiche contemporanee, Lucia spiega come ogni grande opera d'arte implichi un rapporto essenziale con il mondo e con la verità, e si contraddistingua per un contenuto filosofico nascosto che si tratta di intercettare e rivelare. 40 A Hundred Years of Photography.

This article proposes an approach for visual history, in which, it is fallowed the trajectory of the photograph produced by French photo- grapher, Marc Riboud, in 1967. It is adopted a non linear perspective of historical time to analyze the routes of the image and the historical elaboration of the visual representations. The analysis, based on Hans Belting’s Anthropology of image, fallows in different visual cultures the birth of similar images.

Photography is one of the ways we have to fight against the decadence and death that time inevitably brings to everything human, and to each of us as individuals. Its discovery and now its generalisation through the digital system, with the possibility of being produced instantaneously through the most different means, and laboratorially transformed, creates infinite possibilities of reality. It has implications in all areas of human life. It also corresponds to a democratisation of plastic artistic expression, as it allows a cultivated person to produce works of aesthetic value from a set of relatively easy-to-obtain means. In this sense, in the society of spectacle in which we live (G. Debord) and in the proliferating world of images in which we are immersed as compulsive consumers of what we see on screens, photography is central, whether at an ama-teur or professional level. More than denoting realities, photography creates, like other art forms, new reali-ties, which at the same time are fleeting, impossible to fix by the retina, but which also remain, in the photo, imprisoned forever and ever. It is in this sense that it is a contradictory activity, since it stagnates and "kills" what it records, but at the same time makes the fleeting instant live, endure. Photography corresponds to a scopic drive, to a compulsive desire to see, which is at the same time a reason for pleasure and disillusion-ment. Because we always want to see more, jouissance is never complete, by definition, because it only ends with death.

Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

In the timeline where histories of art and photography intersect, Preziosi, with his statement of "Art history is born out of Photograph," makes an initial point. As known, technologies related to cinema have played a key role on analytical Works, classification systems, and the creation of historical narrations since the times when art history appeared as a separate academic discipline in the last quarter of the 19 th century [1]. Widespread use of photography through the end of 19 th century brings the nutrition of modern art trends and its placement in the artists' agenda as an apparatus along itself. The stage of the art history is the universal, national museums of the 19 th century during the period before the foundation of photography archives [2]. The role and efficiency played by painting to determine the plastic language of photography have always been defended in all related researches and arguments done so far. Therefore it is crucial to draw two important guide maps in the research: The first is the bodily extension and photography language which uses in art; the second one is the revelation of intersection points of art history and photography in the narration of art, the points where they blend in each other or disintegrate.

Aistheisis, 2018

Foreword by Fabrizio Desideri and Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis Aesthetics of Photography