Introduction: Post-Photographic Truths: Poetics vs Politics

Abstract

Devoted to contemporary photography artistic practices, under the motto “Post­-Photographic Truths: Poetics vs Politics”, this text aims to question and discuss the drifts of contemporary photographic practices in our post-truth era. Rooted in the historiography of the medium, the poetics and the political are hypothetical boundaries that prevail in current photographic artistic practices. If the reoccurrence of the poetics beautiful image could be understood as a counter-reaction to the vulnerability of the myth of representation. Hence, the exhaustion of the mechanisms of representation and the political stance could be correlated with the photographic endeavour to represent the complexity of the outer world. The invited authors’ essays, reviewed papers and visual essays published on this issue aim to contribute to the critical discussion of this hypothetical quarrel, merging the notions of poetics and politics, while reaffirming the polysemy of photographs.

Keywords

• Post-photography
• History
• Post-truth
• Poetics and politics
• Contemporary art practice