Ensaio sobre o invisível na fotografia

Abstract

The reflection over the statute of the image indicates that showing is not neutral. For Bazin, the photography was the biggest event of the history of plastic arts because it was no longer due to antropocentricalutilitarisms of the representation, being the true realism of the signification of the world with the abolishment of the logical distinction between real and imaginary. Photography, with Barthes, is a mechanical reproduction of an unique instant of the existence. It is an image that is encountered in the designating gesture of a deictical language, under which it cannot be transformed nor distinguished from what it represents. Nevertheless, even for Barthes, photography lies under two languages, an expressive one, and a critical. The language of the subject that is looked at and one of the subject that looks. An experience of death of the represented, that turns it into object of different readings under the founding order of the photography. In a way that its experience can confuse trueness of the referent with reality of its origin. One concludes, with Vernant, that one does not enunciate the truth, the real, but forges a semblance, figures something beyond the inevitable subjectivity, beyond the obsession for semblance, as in the plastic arts, and for illusion, as in peinture. It is suggested, with Comolli, that even photography, the image of the "real", is not neutral as long as an act of showing is always opaque.