Dossier Presentation: "Between art and reality: perspectives on the technical image"

Abstract

The technical production of images, which had in photography its first historical manifestation, meant the advent of a new semiotic status for a vast set of mediated visual texts. In a passage of La Semiosis Social 2 (2013), which is cited by two articles in this dossier, Eliseo Verón points out that the technical device of photography introduces for the first time in the resulting discourse the unequivocal marks of the moment of its production. It is precisely for this reason that Philippe Dubois considers the photographic act as the most important thing: with photography one can no longer “consider the image outside the act that makes it possible”, there is no way of conceiving it “regardless of its circumstances” (2015: 36). The revolution that meant this new capacity for the generation of images ended up placing in the center of the theoretical scene the reflection about the technical device, as a mediating instance that makes it possible for "something" of the referent to be transferred on to the photo ...