FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

Up to now, photography has experienced technological and sociological upheavals. In this context, what about the aesthetics of photography and the photographer’s “single vision”? This site comes to life starting from the fundamental contribution of François Soulages, author of the new edition of “Esthétique de la Photographie”.

In the 2000s, we witnessed a fabulous technological revolution: the emergence of digital photography. Everyone started “shooting shots” on anything (the “clickers” as O. Toscani defined them), because it is easy and it costs nothing. Today, you can take thousands of photos and post them on the Internet right away. It is a radical upheaval with a complete change in the relationship with photography, with the image, with oneself and with the world. It is an exponential explosion of “selfie” photography, it is the era of “ego on-line”. The ontological question no longer arises: “what is photography?” But rather the mediological question: “what use do we make of photography?”. In this sense, a fundamental aspect of this work consists in “serving Levi-Straussian thought” in order to consolidate the foundations of a postmodernity freed from the trap of “everything is worth it” (see also “The fury of Images” by Foncuberta). The approach to est-ethics has matured and was nurtured starting with the digital revolution and then continuing with other questions: what is the relationship with reality? what is the relationship between subject and object? what is a “good” image (and not a “beautiful” photograph as U. Mulas and G.B. Gardin taught us)?

Current photography challenges this double enigma of “reality” and “photography”: moving photos without art into the realm of art. Working on the irreversible or the unfinished – these two dimensions of photographing it – he questions reality and its representations, object and subject, being and time, photography in particular and art in general. Photography creates a deferenced representation by responding specifically to orders and taking into account its probable and possible receptions, sometimes to oppose them.

“AESTHET(H)ICAL PHOTOGRAPHY” proposes a theoretical approach to photography considering paradigmatic “Research” and “Project” as fundamental activities that must always precede shooting. The instant as “instantaneity” is confronted with a temporal ambiguity. We encounter daily a liquefaction (see also: Liquid Modernity by Z. Bauman) in space-time fractals (eg: the images uploaded daily to Instagram), which the photograph itself cannot contain. It cannot be bound to an immobile cut in time, because the ontological meaning of the photographic image “slips”. It shuns the past, dated and past anchors linked in particular to Barthes’ thought that require a re-definition other than the “mortal perception” of “La Chambre Claire”. In fact, in this fundamental text we discover the shortcomings of the theoretical tools capable of capturing the essence of photographic creation. We therefore undertake to redefine them through a critical study, between deconstruction and restructuring, we find new formalisms capable of pushing photography beyond the boundaries of the moment. We therefore compose “photographic journeys” with a poetic of “drift”, “lack” and “uncertainty” where the photographs thus constitute a “deficient” event (obviously, refer to the huge bibliography that we will find in the various photographic projects, left us in inheritance from philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida, Artaud, Levinas, Foucault and others). We observe circumstances in which it is the “tension” that determines them and no longer the mere “constituency of composition”. The instance thus manages to become a yearning for a profound search for meanings, always renewed, towards a “good” photography.