International Conference
“Photography in-between Science, Art and Philosophy”
FBAUL - Auditorium Lagoa Henriques
November 26, 2022
International conference organised by University of Lisbon: CFCUL - Centre for the Philosophy of Sciences, FBAUL - Faculty of Fine Arts and IST - Instituto Superior Técnico. Photography has been the object of several theories, working with concepts as diverse as apparatus in the political/cultural approach by Vilém Flusser, as punctum and studium proposed by Roland Barthes, as psychoanalytic symptom advanced by Didi-Huberman, as aura (fetish) by Walter Benjamin, or as world-image by Susan Sontag. However, all theories point to the same evidence: the complex reality, the several dimensions, of photography. Photography has the capacity to capture and perceive the world, that is, it can, at the same time, absorb the world and understand it. Simultaneously, it encloses a fundamental play between its (apparent) passivity and its transformative effects, between its (questionable) impartiality and its critical power. Photography has yet another dimension, that of being a transcendental exercise: when thinking about the world, photography thinks of itself as an image. This colloquium aims at thinking photography from the perspectives of Science, of Art and of Philosophy. To approach scientific photography, artistic photography, and new technologies. In a world full of images and multiple techniques for capturing and producing images, it is imperative, more than ever, to think photography.
