“Photography is teleportation”. There are surprising answers to the five questions I asked students at two art colleges about their relationship with photography as a material and/or immaterial object. I invite you, if you have the desire and time, to see The photo is mine!, the 15-minute video investigation that I helped create on behalf of the This year’s Mia Photo Fair, where we premiered it. This is a series of interviews with students of the Boccioni artistic high school in Milan and the Toschi artistic high school in Parma. That is, kids around the age of twenty, or less, who study visual culture and still measure themselves, quite a bit, with the still image. And this is already a surprise. If you have time, watch it Who: If you don’t have time, it doesn’t matter, I will summarize. For a better understanding of the video, here are the five original questions:
– What, in your opinion, distinguishes photography from all other images? – Do you use photography to make art, or author’s work? If so, what is the difference between these images and those you take for fun, sharing, personal memory? – Do you keep all the photographs you take? If not, how do you choose the ones to keep? – Do you print at least some of the photographs you take? Why (or why not)? If so, what use do you make of printed photographs? – If you could, would you collect photographs as material objects? Which? To do what?
What struck me about the answers? From the interviews emerge attitudes that frankly I did not foresee, sometimes apparently contradictory. My feeling is that, despite the revolutions in tools, and bypassing the presumed Web breakthrough, some ancient photographic paradigms demonstrate an extraordinary capacity for resistance and adaptation to the changed historical and technological environment. I summarize, quoting some answers:
1. photography is still seen as a messenger of reality, before being (which it can become after a process of selection and perhaps modification) an artistic product: “Immortalizing something that only happened once”, “Free from interpretation ”, “It shows the physical reality, the photographer can only choose some determinations, he does not have all the freedom to create”, “It captures the single moment”.
2. And yet it is a tool that offers great possibilities for expression: “Intimate relationship with oneself”, “Possibility to tell”.
3. There is a profound difference between private photographs and those intended to be seen by everyone: which, however, does not necessarily correspond to a symmetrical attribution of quality and importance: “The photos taken for me are done better, at school I do what the teachers ask me”, “No, they are worse, they are just personal memories”, “If the photo is useful for others it is important”, “Photos taken with a cell phone are stupid”.
4. Even if they are stupid, they are almost never deleted: “I don’t delete, at most I put aside”, “I keep everything because even the worst shots can one day turn out to be artistic”, “I think it’s important to also keep my mistakes”, ” My hard drives are full”, “I shoot a lot and I keep everything, digital photography has been my downfall”.
5. But they don’t print them, partly because it’s expensive, partly because they don’t feel up to it. They consider the choice to print a photograph as its promotion to a higher level of quality and authorship: “I don’t see myself as that important as an author”, “I’m not that good yet”, “I don’t feel the need even if I know the risk to lose them.”
6. They don’t feel the need to see too many author’s photographs, and seem hesitant in choosing their models: “I’d like to hang my own photos in the house”, “I haven’t yet found my photographer that I absolutely want to own”, “I don’t I have the money but I will do it”…
I may be wrong, but the appearance of a generational revolution in the uses of photographs seems to me to be only the result of a mistake due to the novelty of the tools and sharing channels. Certainly the ease of use, the easy editability, the possibility of instant diffusion, the multiplication – which is now truly true also for personal photographs, which once existed practically in a single copy, in the album or in the shoebox , then the negative was lost and goodbye to the era of reproducibility – all these things generated a mutation of habits, spaces, ways and times in our relationship with the fixed image. And yet, under this strong current, as in rivers, there is it is a slower movement, in which I see great continuities.
The photographs are preserved. Photographs save moments. The photographs take. The photographs surprise because they contain more than we thought we had put into them. Photographs can say something about us to others. Photographs, looked at over time, can say new things. There are beautiful photographs and ugly photographs, but none or almost none are condemnable to destruction. Some, but only if they are worth a lot, will be able to ascend the altar of the press.
The press: let’s pause here for a moment. The fate of photography as an object in the era of the dematerialisation of media was the theme that the Mia management had entrusted to me to explore with different guests. We talked about the value of photographs rediscovered in drawers with Erik Kessels, the great poet of vernacular photography; of the nostalgia of the unique copy embodied by NFTs, digital certificates of authenticity, with Simone Arcagni and Serena Tabacchi: and of the future of images in the social era with Simone “Brahmino” Bramante and Maria Vittoria Baravelli. What came out of it, it seems to me, is that photography continues to claim, in spite of everything, its share of the aura. Even in the dematerialized environment.
Whether it is a collector’s digital vault, or a twenty-year-old’s photo album, it is still the unique object that is thought of. The fascination that photographs emanate does not depend, at this point, on their material consistency, but on their conceptual dimension. Yes, perhaps we should start thinking that the true definition of photography does not lie so much in respecting a series of protocols and procedures (in which light, the existence of an object in front of the lens and a surface that registers it must play a part) , which are if anything the preconditions of the idea of photography. But we can talk about photography only when that procedure generates an image (image, and not picture, to use Mitchell’s distinction) full of a suggestion which continues to be, unfortunately for Baudrillard and his followers, that of a special relationship with reality . It makes little difference to the fact that analogue photographs were shared in person and in small circles, while digital ones were theoretically launched like balloons in the sky of the Web.
I say theoretically, because during the discussion (in which the students of the Boccioni high school in Milan actively and pleasantly participated, thanks guys?), it emerged that sharing personal photographs in the presence is still a very widespread method, almost the favorite : it is on the screen of the mobile phone taken from the pocket, and shown in the palm of the hand to friends, just as was done with the horrible PVC albums of color photos printed at the corner shop, that together they look at the photographs of the trip, the selfie, the stolen portrait, the moments of the concert. Because it’s nice, they told me, “to talk about it, laugh about it, exchange jokes”, looking at each other and not guessing each other on Whatsapp with pre-packaged smileys.
Naturally, this video investigation is only a small core sample in the great mountain of the unknown generation (to us boomers). I wouldn’t make a general theory of it. Also because the voices are not all in agreement. Let’s say, it is a series of non-negligible clues. And in the end one of the boys said, implacably: “I never print my photographs because the F must be a volatile object, useful only for the moment in which it is taken, if I were to make a show I would burn everything immediately afterwards”.
#dont #print
– 2024-04-25 05:44:49
