Barcelona Llibres

The gesture of pointing illustrates the essential principle of the visual document, and this is the origin of this essay on photography made with photographs. In it, Joan Fontcuberta unpacks a series of considerations on the twilight condition of photography that, under the pretext of refuting the canonical thought of Roland Barthes, attempts to take it further and unravel some of the circumstances of an unhinged present. For Barthes, every photograph indicates that "this has been" ('ça-a-été'), a generic and essential message that, however, is not enough for us today because we need to resolve the vexed indeterminacy of the "this". If all photography, moreover, is nothing but the result of different operations of "posing", that is to say, of theatricality, it is worth asking whether the camera can deal with a real reality or whether its task is limited to speaking only of the set and the disguise. In the postface to this text -irritating for those entrenched in the 'ancien régime' of photography-, Valentín Roma writes: "in the face of the sacralisation of the figure of the author and the investiture of a court of privileged interpreters, Fontcuberta points out that the only way to free ourselves from everything that history imposes on us is to become aware of and historicise -even parody- our links with the reading of photography".