Are you a paleophotographer?
I am interested in the prehistory of photography, because it explains the 19th century, when communication needs were very different from ours…
There were no selfies.
…And because this contrast also defines our era. Today it is difficult for us to remember that photography at birth was, first and foremost, the definitive guarantor of truth and memory.
Has photography stopped certifying reality to just accompany the moment?
Today photography is already a language of relationship with others, which communicates intuitively, universally and directly,
Are images today as true or false as words were?
Images are no longer the sacrosanct repository of memory, but merely a way of recreating it. Photography was the unquestionable memory of light and today it is data.
Is the ‘verba volant photograph manent’ over?
This was before, when destroying an image was a sin: today we are already in the post-photographic era, characterized by the massification of the image and its globalized socialization.
Doesn’t mass photography trivialize it?
Today we have an overproduction of images and we generate so many that they constitute their own reality until our whole life ends up being these images taken.
Does anyone have time to see all the photos he takes? Does anyone ever watch them?
The meaning of the photographic act has changed: it is no longer about witnessing and remembering, but about entertaining, celebrating, having fun… It no longer serves to preserve the moment, but to appropriate it for fun.
Do we take photos that only document our vanity?
This narcissistic photograph, the selfie, has already replaced the attempt that was a document. Before, a tourist took a photo of the Sagrada Família, and today the Sagrada Família is the excuse to take another selfie.
Because?
Because the investment of the subject, who takes the photograph, and the object is also generalized. The object ends up being the same subject.
Is it good for anyone anywhere at any time to photograph anything?
Socialize the image. In its origins, on the other hand, the photographic act was reserved for the elites and only for moments considered memorable.
From photographing so much, doesn’t photography lose its power of evocation?
When written language became widespread, it was also thought that it would make us lose the ability to memorize.
Doesn’t living immersed in an avalanche of images impoverish the iconic language?
On the contrary, it makes citizens visually literate.
You are an integrated.
I am open to innovations, but throughout history these innovations have also had their dark side. Every innovation involves a balance of losses and gains; it’s about putting it on the scale and seeing what weighs more.
What have we lost in the secular passage from the daguerreotype to the selfie?
The origins of photography at the dawn of the industrial revolution permeate its evolution until the digital revolution. Photography was light and memory forever; today it is data for the ego and the moment.
And you, what have you gained as a photographer?
I started photographing in the seventies, at the end of the Franco regime, with the emergence of structuralism and the counterculture. And I still drink from those sources. Then, photography had to be first and foremost a witness to reality.
Shouldn’t photography be content to reflect reality, but to change it?
But soon I dedicated myself to advertising photography, and then, I discovered that photography, like every human discipline, is a construct, a construction.
So is memory itself and you invented animals for the MoMA.
I started with projects, like the one exhibited at the Science Museum in London or MoMA and praised by The New York Times, although I doubted it was art, because the three elements are intermingled: matter, reality and truth.
Are fake news weapons of war?
The first wars were poeticized; then, painted; then, photographed, and the one in Vietnam, the first televised…
…Deferred. The one in Iraq was already live.
…And the one in Ukraine is already from TikTok, and the one in Gaza, an image of artificial intelligence.
What are we missing on this path?
We have gone from staging reality to the plug image, which prevents the flow of information in Gaza; or in the sweet image of TikTok, in which there is no longer a hierarchy of values, only a capture of attention. The AI ??already liquidates any document value that might be left in the image.
