Exploring Contemporary Realities: Photography, Ethics, and the Production of Knowledge examines how contemporary photographic practices contribute to critical understandings of culture, space, and society within the editorial framework of scopio Magazine AAI and the CONTRAST III project. The essay analyses four key contributions: Joana Caetano’s “An Ethics of Seeing,” which interprets Gerda Taro’s Spanish Civil War images as “photoscapes” oscillating between utopian aspiration and dystopian testimony; Paul Landon’s “The Resonance of Abandonment,” which reflects on the Vilnius Sports Palace as a modern ruin embodying memory, vulnerability, and failed utopian promise; Dária Salgado and Sérgio Tavares’s “Trees as Visual Thinking,” which foregrounds trees as agents of visual, sensory, and ecological knowledge in the urban landscape; and Lukas Sander’s unfinished, a site-specific video walk interrogating Zurich’s Manegg district as an emergent, corporately branded urban environment in flux.
Through these case studies, the essay demonstrates how photography extends beyond representation to become a tool of knowledge production. In dialogue with theoretical perspectives from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, and Michael Marder, the works highlight photography’s capacity to act ethically, to mediate cultural memory, to articulate ecological imaginaries, and to destabilise dominant narratives of urban development.
The integration of these contributions within scopio Magazine AAI reflects the broader mission of CONTRAST III, which fosters interdisciplinary collaboration across art, architecture, and design while situating photography within global debates such as the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus. By bridging artistic practice, pedagogy, and research, the project affirms the role of photography as a transversal and interdisciplinary language, capable of confronting contemporary urgencies and nurturing alternative futures. Ultimately, the essay positions visual practice as a privileged medium for generating expanded critical knowledge and constructing new imaginaries of the built and inhabited world.