One of the main questions currently facing the world of image production, particularly in photography, is its relevance—more explicitly, its raison d’être within a landscape marked by total saturation.
In a global context where the most widely used device in contemporary societies is the smartphone and where images are predominantly published on social networks—where the vertical format has been adopted to match the standardized scrolling format—photography appears to be experiencing a crisis comparable to that which painting underwent, not when photography was invented, but when image-making became commonplace with pointand- shoot cameras, such as Sony’s 1964 Handycam. A seminal exhibition like The Photographer’s Eye, conceived by John Szarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966, which juxtaposed vernacular photography with images created by Photographers (with a capital P), would have no place today because the flow of images has exhausted the possibility of judgment. Moreover, the radical democratization of devices precludes any comparative overview, and the field of authorial photography has absorbed all the paraphernalia of technical errors, indecisions, and a vernacular passion that has intensified since the 1950s, from the nomadic gaze of Robert Frank to the conceptual functionality of Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, or Andy Warhol.
Curiously, if, in the first instance, the primacy of technology was the response found by authors— whether through the advent of digital media or the possibilities afforded by large-format prints, which imported into photography a corporeality that previously belonged to painting (or to communication, as was the case with the Russian avant-gardes from the early 1920s)—the widespread use of high-resolution portable image-capturing techniques, coupled with the capacity for image storage, has produced a contrary and unexpected effect: a nostalgic return to analogue techniques, a renewed sensitivity to the sophistication of printing (as evidenced by the resurgence of platinum printing, for instance), and a renewed importance of the photobook, often in the form of an artist’s book, with all the multiplicity of possibilities that such a format can entail.
On the other hand, the disassociation of photography from the notion of an “exemplary image”, mainly through the use of seriality, has introduced into the photographic universe—especially since the 1970s—a notion that the image is always a system of interdependencies, blurring the epistemological boundaries of the photographic field or subsuming it into the broader realm of artistic image production.
Photography is thus undergoing a profound crisis, but not one of identity (which has long been examined and pondered by practitioners and commentators alike), but one of relevance: Why is it important to produce new images?
The answer can only be addressed by producing images that consciously strive to exist on the fine line between their representational quality, their interrogation of the relationship with the viewer, and how they deal with the physical, material, and embodied melancholy of their presence. In this sense, the path for photography can only reside in the complexity of the material production process of the image, which, to justify its existence, must be the outcome of an epistemological process of editing that might culminate in images whose scale, medium, hapticity, or required distance transform them into relevant images.
Frequently, the subject matter of images consciously produced within a creative or artistic context is hardly distinguishable from the radically automated images of the smartphone. Sometimes, even their aesthetic, or indeed their technical-representational quality, may be indistinguishable.
The field of photography must, therefore, be approached from the perspective of its destiny as a material image, as an imagistic procedure that confronts, through its precise scale, its exact pagination in a book, the rigour of its editing, and the materiality of its presence, an engaged viewer.
It is in this sense that the teaching of photography is fundamental—not (or not only) as a historically transversal inquiry into the procedures that can generate images, but as an education towards an economy of relevance for each image, requiring a shared reflection on the equation that anything can be photographed, but the image is not a representation of that thing—it is the result of a process of choices and subtleties that define a relationship.
Cover image: Exhibition of the Contrast project at the Portuguese Centre of Photography (2024)