Néstor García Canclini, Aesthetics and Photographic Image: Presentation and notes

Abstract

This text analyzes the “fascination” that derives from photographic practice and its capacity to bring subjects closer and further from reality, to make the world simultaneously intimate and distant. Both tourists who practice it on their trips and creative photographers who seek an unusual perspective, see in photographic images ways of witnessing their departures from routine. It also reflects on how photography can take the subject out of the ordinary when, used as a research instrument, its purpose is the unmasking of common places. Not only photos are taken on trips. The photo can be considered as a journey in itself: as the memory road. Exploration of what doesn’t exist yet or is dormant among things. Looking at a photo is always looking somewhere else; taking photos is going towards the place where one will be looked at.