La memoria de la fotografía

If we take seriously the role of photography in contemporary culture as the basic structure of most of the images we see, we will discover that its significance has continued to increase since the providential historical appearance of the daguerreotype in the 19th century. Already at that origin it seemed destined to appear before History as a long-awaited artifact. But its consequences would far exceed the expectations of the most optimistic witnesses of its time. For this reason, in this book, we understand photography as a complex artifact that spans three centuries and is situated between its historical dimension, its status as a document and its high content of fiction. This unique combination of borrowed elements, of things seen and of previous images make it the bearer of a memory of its own, a memory of images that marks a new anthropological scenario in which we are so immersed that we can hardly bring ourselves to the plane of consciousness. The memory of photography is almost more important than its history as an artifact, which is why, in this book, we go through its vicissitudes from the perspective of our relationship with that very enigmatic phenomenon that is the image.