Fascination, Complexity and Contradictions of a Theory of Photography

Abstract

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 laboratory-processed, 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 amateur or professional level. More than denoting realities, photography creates, like other art forms, new realities, 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 disillusionment. Because we always want to see more, jouissance is never complete, by definition, because it only ends with death.