The conditions of the image
by Delfim Sardo
On the opening page of a recent book, the French anthropologist Philippe Descola (Les Formes du Visible, 2021) begins by stating: “Of the myriad of images produced by humans for at least eighty thousand years, only a tiny fraction can be traced back to art and its history”. In this myriad of images are contained all kinds of representations, from imagetic productions with cult value, to images of bodies, decorative, votive or utilitarian images that, however, have in common the need to present an absent. In a complex way, the photographic image has come to fulfil, after all the post-miracles of Art History (from Hegel to Danto, from Belting to the very recent Yves Michaud), a version of that same need to evoke the absent, its presentification, or its liberation from the inevitability of the blindness of oblivion.
After a process of half a century (or much more, if we take Hegel as the defining moment of the death sentence), the arc of the History of Art, understood as the history of the spirit, or of style, or of Kunstwollen, or of the survival of Duck formulas, has found a moment of sunset, or of aphasia, even if tactical. The field of the photographic spreads, like a blur that is impossible to contain, beyond the sphere of the artistic, or its secant zone in relation to what we may continue to understand as the field of art (with a capital, perhaps). Photographic image production, although today very difficult to design in epistemological terms, understood as the production of lenticular images or numerical combination (or both), occupies a large part of our possibility of representing the world and, above all, has replaced drawing as a way of mediating our fixation on the semantic problem of representation. In this sense, photography (so named in schools, in many museums and archives) has taken the place of graphics, also replacing the idea of the internal limit of the represented object by the notion of cut (or caesura, as it remained in the theoretical) reflection in the field of the visible. In this exercise of fixing the gaze, in this permanent mediation between the eye and the world through orthoses increasingly embedded in our daily communicational possibility (the mobile phone as a parergon of the contemporary device) a new and paradoxical model of evocation of the absent is drawn: it is the image of the self, built fragmentarily, in the gaze on the small everyday life, the beach in winter, the abandoned coffee cup. the rest of the eve or the furtive image of the ephemeral and fleeting, which asserts itself as an image of convocation of the impossibility of memory – and, therefore, of the acceptance of oblivion as destiny. This second instance romanticism, voted to volition in the social networks, ravages, like a specter, the urgency of the efficacy of the photographic as the great builder of the evocation of the absent, as Hermes at the service of the survival of images, because it is the most important sector of the process of forgetting. It is in this context that it becomes fundamental to think about the role and status of the photographic image (or the photographic as a performance) in dialogue with other forms of construction of the imagetics of the world, from art to architecture, from design to cinema, that is, to the fields that assert themselves in the universe of the sensitive and reflect on the issue of representation. It is in this sector of relationship that the photographic can build its own epistemology of its operativity, its functionality and the way in which it can resignify fields of visuality, but also think about its hapticity (besides, of course, thinking about its historicity, the link to time, the grounding of the visible in the projective definition of a spatiality and a porous temporality, as has been thought of from Benjamin to Sontag, from Barthes to Flussel, just to mention reference texts).
The field of the academy, where reflection must always have its transcendentals on the horizon, is one of the places in which photography can take itself as a possibility of revision of the processes of seeing, fixing, reconfiguring and resignifying the visible in a process of experimentation and error, of repetition and rehearsal. The Contrast project, by collecting the experiences of the various formative experiences and placing them in an index, under the gaze of naming and presentation, implies the construction of a necessary epistemology of the photographic but also, and above all, of an epistemology of teaching and research on the relational nature of the image, its complexity and its conditions of possibility.
