In the field of dislocated similarities and empathic proximities

Abstract

The starting point in this essay assumes a view on photography through small fragments conceived as parts of a poliptic. If, as Barthes claims, everything can be a text, what is of interest here is not so much the meaning, nor the comparative and/or evolutive understanding that endows the present with the last word, but a stress on the character of heterogeneity and unrest when an ordaining and classificatory structure can be moved and its hierarchy undone over the technique and the documental record codified by the historical or journalistic relevance. In times of an unthinkable expansion of the imagetic arsenal and of screens that untiringly promise to reveal the facts in real time, be it a matter of intimate facts, be it a matter of facts of planetary significance, it seems wise to suspend those certainties about the photographic image in order to interrogate its very nature, asking how it survives such metamorphoses, constituting itself and persisting in its artistic condition.