What is the point of taking photographs in 2019?

What role do digital images play in our era, in the virtual and shared era, years after W.J.T. Mitchell sanctioned the famous "pictorial turn"?

Is it ever possible to tell something new?

Is it still interesting to tell anything by delegating narrative possibilities to the visual?

An inexorable bombardment of questions to which we can only try to respond, ending however with the bitter taste of defeat: a sense of loss, of inadequacy, of disorientation.

The inspiration for these optimistic and fruitful reflections is offered by some of the works included in a recent exhibition at the Lato gallery, in Prato.


© Installation view of the exhibition 'Post', Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019

© Installation view of the exhibition 'Post', Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019

 

© Steve Bisson, curator of the exhibition 'Post' at Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019

Located just next to the emblematic work of Henry Moore, right on the entrance of one main city squares, in this corner of white paradise, we find the works by three members of the collective Synap(see): Andrea Buzzichelli, Stefano Parrini, and Giovanni Presutti.Curated by Steve Bisson, the exhibition is not by chance entitled POST: this short prefix contains an aleph of infinite meanings and declinations, all but united by the desire to put themselves beyond something. The choice of not inserting any words afterward, makes us understand how the intention of the exhibition is not to sort out any classification, neither to be classified in any convenient region of the post-abused photography, but rather to offer an analytical perspective - without expectations - of the chaotic contemporary photographic production.

 

© Installation view of the exhibition 'Post', works from the series 'FAIL' by Stefano Parrini, Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019

© Installation view of the exhibition 'Post', works from the series 'FAIL' by Stefano Parrini, Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019

© Untitled from the series 'FAIL' by Stefano Parrini

The book 'FAIL' by Stefano Parrini, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018


The book 'FAIL' by Stefano Parrini, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018
 

© Installation view of the exhibition 'Post', works from the series 'The Era of Beyond Truth' by Giovanni Presutti, Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019

© The book 'The Era of Beyond Truth' by Giovanni Presutti, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018

© The book 'The Era of Beyond Truth' by Giovanni Presutti, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018

© The book 'The Era of Beyond Truth' by Giovanni Presutti, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018

© The book 'The Era of Beyond Truth' by Giovanni Presutti, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018 

Thus as a breach which illustrates their being in the world, a post-index. In short: a finger pointed that shows us what happens in the brief time of a virtual second, and, at the same time, medium that invites to meta-linguistic reflection on the nature of photography, obviously in post-Peirce perspective! 

In 2019, in the era of prevailing story-telling and photojournalism, not everyone is interested in using the photographic medium to show something that happens through a solid linear narrative system, even if this remains of course legitimate. No, there are other authors who, to paraphrase the aforementioned W.J.T. Mitchell frees the problem of realism from the ontology of the medium", so much so that, quoting Bisson directly, "The image ceases to be an objective representation, understood as a mirror of a state of being and an underlying desire to preserve its chronicle versus the incontrovertible destiny”.

So the question now: is photography no longer the mirror with memory? Is it the end of a marriage? Photography of a broken heart? In Latin, cor ruptum, corrupt, in turn perhaps etymologically linked to cum luctum, with mourning. Death, broken organs, degeneration, chaos.

From the digitally ruined images of Parrini with his series ‘FAIL’, a container of corrupted memories due to the inexorability of the pixel which, although erased and recovered, leaves traces of a time that was. Then, the gruesome immortality and digital-moral tragedy of Presutti's fake universe with ‘The Era Of Beyond Truth’, up to the apparent nostalgic resolution of Buzzichelli who, with ‘Resurrection’, deceives us of having solved the problem of the corruption of the photographic surface.

A multiverse of theoretical speculations are triggered by these ideas: is it always about photography? What is photography? But above all, does it still make sense to ask these questions?

Lev Manovich, father of the fundamental ‘The Language of New Media’, notes in his famous text how the development of the Graphic User Interface (GUI), besides having legitimized software like Photoshop, was also "parallel to the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order ", which is usually defined as post-modern.

Furthermore, quoting Fredric Jameson, about post-modern cultural production: we can no longer look directly at the world with our own eyes, but we must trace the mental images on the walls of the cave. But wasn't that just what Sontag recognized as the eidos of photography? Then, has photography always been something post? Or, simply and tremendously very much pre?

Therefore anticipating speculation and trends, approaches and results. Photography - now digital and digitalized - represents the meeting point between the "development of modern media and the development of computers". It’s the triumph of a potentially immortal archiving, yet a victim of degradation and corruption because so is the society that generates it. From the age of technical reproducibility to the era of "post", well provided on Facebook.

© Installation view of the exhibition 'Post', works from the series 'Resurrection' by Andrea Buzzichelli, Galleria Lato, Prato, 2019