Fotografia, disegno e pittura: vicinanze e lontananze. Note sulla natura della fotografia

Abstract

The article focuses on the nature of the photographic medium and on the tormented relationship between photography and painting which, since their invention, have seen them as opposed, perhaps because they were structured on the assumption that both disciplines were aimed at covering the same territory: the image . One therefore wonders how much the logic of the picture affects or, on the contrary, mechanisms closer to anthropological and psychoanalytic concepts. The issue is complex because photography fits into a crack in the theoretical opposition which, since ancient times, has seen the reality of phenomena and the truth of ideas in opposition and, since its invention, has had a double life, living with the duality of representation/presence, a sort of perturbing ambiguity that has marked its history and that still lasts today. Looking at photography as an anthropologically new object, "uncomfortable" but extremely interesting and rich to decipher, attention is paid to issues that have more to do with the philosophical interrogation that is brought into play with the photographic act, but not with the materiality of objects or the analysis of reciprocal influences, focusing on the magical aspect inherent in the photographic image and its trace characteristic which, starting from the writings of William Fox Talbot , one of the pioneers of the photographic process, were then underlined by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Philip Dubois, Jean-Christophe Bailly.