Photography Theory presents forty of the world's most active art historians and theorists, including Victor Burgin, Joel Snyder, Rosalind Krauss, Alan Trachtenberg, Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Squiers, Margaret Iversen and Abigail Solomon-Godeau in animated debate on the nature of photography.

Photography has been around for nearly two centuries, but we are no closer to understanding what it is. For some people, a photograph is an optically accurate impression of the world, for others, it is mainly a way of remembering people and places. Some view it as a sign of bourgeois life, a kind of addiction of the middle class, whilst others see it as a troublesome interloper that has confused people's ideas of reality and fine art to the point that they have difficulty even defining what a photograph is. For some, the whole question of finding photography's nature is itself misguided from the beginning.

This provocative second volume in the Routledge The Art Seminar series presents not one but many answers to the question what makes a photograph a photograph?

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Marshall Macluhan

Fotografiamos objetos desechables, las cosas de uso diario que olvidamos una vez que tiramos a la basura. Queremos resignificar al objeto de uso cotidiano haciendo una reflexión sobre el utilitarismo consumista. Utilizamos como eje a la nostalgia, para ello invitamos a cuatro escritores: Roberto Castillo, Abril Castro, Lorena Mancilla, Mariana Martínez, ellos escribieron, en un ejercicio de vincular a la imagen con las palabras, un texto que saca la fotografía de su aislamiento y la pone en el contexto de su contraparte: la historia humana detrás del objeto retratado. En este proyecto buscamos recordar el paralelismo entre la cosa misma y los acontecimientos que la rodean, donde la única relación es la condición efímera de ambos.
FOTOS: SANDRA BELLO Y LOUIE NAVARRO
Texto: LORENA MANCILLA