ECAL Editions, ISBN-13: 978-2970115748, English, 206 pages, 2017, Switzerland

Defining photography as a medium is not a simple task after the digitalisation of everything, since online it’s just endlessly produced and reproduced without any possible effective control. But it’s also not easy to define its means of production, since they are mainly in everybody’s pockets, and even less how we can anymore distinguish anymore among a ’photograph’ and an ’image’. Under this shaking uncertainty, artists and photographers are confronted on a daily basis with the unavoidable philosophical dualism of materialising and dematerialising the image. This publication stems from a structured research project by the Master Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. It is a valuable resource to understand photography from a current viewpoint. Curators, art historians, professional photographers, professors, artists and journalists contribute different texts researching the algorithms involved in the image overflowing production and manipulation, as well as the challenges of archiving and retrieving, and the new multiple trajectories opened by smartphones and social media. The key aspect of the image ‘materialisation’ is developed and embodied in the students’ experiments, produced during focused workshops. All the subjects involved worked with a material in an ever-changing state, being able to produce present-day works, grounded in accurate historical analysis, inspiring future strategies of productions and diffusion.