Nature fotografiche

Abstract

What does photography mean? This is the question Barthes asks himself He has already worked at length on this medium, indicating hidden meanings and forms of visual rhetoric. hidden meanings and forms of visual rhetoric, discussing the power of this particular type of strength of this particular type of image and the levels of reading it allows, but the project of this book is different. Its object is not "the" photographs, understood as artistic or social phenomena, but "the" photography, its "specific". its "specificity". What does photography mean? This is the question, although never fully explicit, that Floch poses with his Forms of the Imprint,10 in front of five specific images. specific images. His is not meant to be a theoretical reflection on the photography, nor an attempt to define this art beyond its manifestations, revealing truths or presumed intrinsic essences. For him, semiotics begins when we stop asking ourselves the problem of what photography is, especially if the yardstick if the yardstick assumed for such a judgment is a single individual.