Interact | Arts and Culture
As we have pointed out above, photogra-
Liguigli, D., Wandering around (2), London.
phy is the light trace left by the world on the photosensitive matter. For this reason semiology settled photography into the set of index signs. Index is a kind of sign that indicates the truth of a determinate reality, just as the fingerprints or footprints on the scene of a crime indicate the truth of he who committed the crime, the truly guilty. Therefore, photography is to be considered as the fingerprints on the scene of a crime, namely an evidence of the truth, in this case not of the guilty but of the world. The world leaves its fingerprint on photosensitive matter. This evidence is epistemic and thus, inasmuch “episteme” literally means “something which is above ground, on the surface, in light”, something that everyone can see and that no one can deny it exists. Episteme is incontrovertible. However, this linguistic essence that we could also call the photography’s unconscious, as it has been called by others, may have a sublime purpose, that is being epistemic evidence of the beauty of the world. Photography may be the one language able to prove that beauty is not merely an ideal, something that can only be found in a dream or in the ethereal, in pure imagination and creation, but it is here and now, within this Earth, under our eyes, within the pure materiality and actuality of the world. This is what some photographers were and still are able to find and prove through photography, because as Josef Sudek said: “photography is always around the corner”.
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Liguigli, D., Wandering around (3), London.