O Olhar Moderno

Historical and theoretical research on photography was a marginal object in the field of social sciences and critical thought in general during many decades. The exclusion that this object has been submitted, so omnipresent in the history and the memory of the 19th and the 20th centuries, can only be understood as a repression operation proportional to the importance that photography has gained in everyday life. Of that omnipresence, partly traumatic due to its ‘reality’ excess, has Barthes given notice in his work. But for rationally inexplicable reasons, this more humanistic, philosophical or sociological interest perceived by Barthes, as it had also been by Benjamin, didn’t have much consequence, especially if we think in a continental European context. Multiple times revered, but forgotten in the drawing of academic curricula, Barthes’ book didn’t achieve, in the end, its deserved destiny. And Benjamin’s writings were too often restricted to the debate on ‘art’.

Thirty years after the publication of Barthes’book, historical and theoretical research on photography begins now, marked by grieve and retrospection triggered by the digital revolution, to bear its fruits. This book by Maria João Baltazar is a sign of that change, and also that the courage to approach that area of the repressed of modern human experience – the experience of photography – compensates the effort. Before us now is a book – of which I’ve followed the first version as a MBA theses – that constitutes an incentive to the pursuit of the research in this area, and among its several qualities I would emphasize the one that seems more interesting to me: revealing photography as an object that places itself among the crossing of multiple disciplines, in the same way it mirrors the crossing of multiple experiences in life.

By working the personal memory question through photography, its relation with the recollection and rememorizing, Maria João Baltazar convokes what is most fascinating on this medium, in the sense that underlines and analyses the disturbing and undecidable character of private photography – as well as any other. But it is in this Gordian knot that most likely resides the reason for which the debate on photography and its history has been so tortuous.