Photography is a virus inoculated in society, culture and the arts. Since its birth it integrated the functions of various pre-existing tools, such as people’s memory, the soldier’s telescope, the scientist’s rule and the painter’s brush. It developed around an endless research for its own autonomy, but its growing diffusion and the increasing number of its applications make this objective more and more unreasonable. The evolutionary model of photography is based on the principle of contamination, which involves both its own system, so that the typical features of traditional genres (reportage, portrait, landscape, architecture, still-life...) are mixed together in order to form a magmatic new vocabulary,
as well as the other representation techniques, inevitably influencing the preparation of drawings, paintings, installations and so on. This is a process which affects not only the language of photography, but also the physical device itself. Today pictures are not taken with a simple camera only, but also by using phones, computers and Playstations... Photography attacks different instruments and sneaks inside them. Photography will be everywhere.
The images in these pages are taken from past and future editions of Picture Perfect, one of Fantom’s most distinctive sections; where we explore the interconnections between photography and other media and artistic practices.