Fotografia espansa

Abstract

The article reconsiders the idea of the ‘postphotographic’ as an umbrella category capable of encompassing both the continuities and discontinuities between analog, or early digital photography, and algorithmic photography. To do so, it explores two boundaries: the border between photography and visualization techniques, and that between still and moving images. Both are central and defining nodes of the photographic, which are challenged by what some studies have called the postoptical regime: the era marking the decline of vision as a technique for understanding the world, and of lenticular devices as prostheses of the human eye. An archaeological approach to photography allows to uncover, in the deep history of the medium, a model of the photographic already grounded in measurement rather than in the perception of the world.