Are you a paleophotographer?
I am interested in the prehistory of photography, because it explains the 19th century, when communication needs were very different from ours...
There were no selfies.
...And because that contrast also defines our time. Today it is difficult for us to remember that photography at its birth was, above all, the definitive guarantor of truth and memory.
Has photography stopped certifying reality to only accompany the moment?
Today photography is already a language of relationship with others, which communicates to us in an intuitive, universal and direct way.
Are the images today as true or false as the words were?
Images are no longer the sacrosanct repository of memory, but only a way to recreate it. Photography was the unquestionable memory of light and today it is data.
Is the 'verba volant photograph manent' over?
That was before, when destroying an image was a sin: today we are already in the post-photographic era, characterized by the massification of the image and its globalized socialization.
Doesn't massifying photography trivialize it?
Today we have an overproduction of images and we generate so many that they constitute their own reality until our entire life ends up being those images taken.
Does anyone have time to see all the photos he takes? Does anyone ever look at them?
The meaning of the photographic act has changed: it is no longer about witnessing and remembering, but about entertaining, celebrating, having fun... It is no longer about preserving the moment, but about appropriating it for fun.
Do we take photos that only document our vanity?
That narcissistic photograph, the selfie, has already replaced the attempt that was a document. Before, a tourist took a photo of the Sagrada Família, and today the Sagrada Família is the excuse to take another selfie.
Because?
Because the inversion of the subject, the one who takes the photograph, and the object is also generalized. The object ends up being the subject itself.
Is it good for anyone, anywhere, at any time, to photograph anything?
Socialize the image. In its origins, however, the photographic act was reserved for the elites and only for moments considered memorable.
From photographing so much, doesn't photography lose its evocative power?
When written language became widespread, it was also thought that it would make us lose the ability to memorize.
Doesn't living immersed in an avalanche of images impoverish iconic language?
On the contrary, it makes citizens visually literate.
You are an integrated.
I am open to innovations, but throughout history these innovations have also had their dark side. Every innovation involves a balance of losses and gains; It's about putting it on the scale and seeing what weighs more.
What have we lost in the centuries-old move from the daguerreotype to the selfie?
The origins of photography at the dawn of the industrial revolution permeate its evolution until the digital revolution. Photography was light and memory forever; Today they are data for the ego and the moment.
And what have you gained as a photographer?
I started photographing in the seventies, at the end of the Franco regime, with the emergence of structuralism and the counterculture. And I still drink from those fountains. So, photography had to be above all a testimony of reality.
Should photography not be content with reflecting reality, but rather change it?
But soon I dedicated myself to advertising photography, and later, I discovered that photography, like any human discipline, is a construct, a construction.
Memory itself is also memory and you invented animals for MoMA.
I started with projects, like the one exhibited at the Science Museum in London or at the MoMA that The New York Times praised, but doubting whether it was art, because they intermingled the three elements: matter, reality and truth.
Are fake news weapons of war?
The first wars were poeticized; then, painted; Then, the photographed ones arrived, and the one from Vietnam, the first televised...
...On a delayed basis. The one from Iraq was already live.
...and the one in Ukraine is already from TikTok, and the one in Gaza, an image of artificial intelligence.
What do we miss on that path?
We have gone from staging reality to the buffer image, which prevents the flow of information in Gaza; or the candy image of TikTok, in which there is no longer a hierarchy of values, only attention-grabbing. The AI now liquidates any document value that may remain in the image.
