Images as force

Abstract

Assuming that images are forces and not facts or forms, the present essay elaborates a theory of photography as the decline of the sense, pursuing the relations between the contemporary and the image in Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy, in Marcel Mauss, Alfred Métraux, Georges Bataille, Murilo Mendes, Roland Barthes, etc. Next, the trajectory is retraced of photographers Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, in order to illustrate a procedure that deviates from autonomic and lettered modernism, reading their work as a fiction without an author, a fulguration with no exterior, an instant passage from the organic to the inorganic, a mixing between work and text and an abandonment of action in favor of inoperativeness.