Oltre la rottura postfotografica: teorie, pratiche e genealogie mediali

Abstract

The discourse of postphotography has been structured less by empirical practices than by a recurrent trope of rupture. From William J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye (1992) to Joan Fontcuberta’s theorization of a “postphotographic condition”, the digital has been cast as an epistemic break, a radical suspension of indexical truth. Yet such narratives reiterate modernist and postmodernist investments in medium-specificity and technological determinism. In practice, digital photography has operated otherwise: by normalizing manipulation, re-legitimizing color, re-introducing 3D and immersive modes of representation, and embedding images in networked circuits of circulation, it has exposed the exclusions on which canonical histories were built. Informed by practice, media archaeology and digital media studies suggest alternative genealogies, in which digital imaging appears less as a revolution than as a reconfiguration of long-standing logics of remediation, infrastructure, and intermedial exchange. Against the rhetoric of ‘postness’, this essay proposes a historiographical shift: from the death of photography to the persistence of its hybrid, materially grounded, and institutionally embedded forms.