Mauro Zanchi, La fotografia come medium estendibile, 2022

The arguments in this book are an attempt to rethink the terms, limits and logics by which we produce or convey images and photographic images, attempting encroachments or reinventions through different declinations. Perhaps it is true that in the present time it is more correct to speak of images rather than photographs, as the photographic has been incorporated into the complex combinatorial machine of the iconosphere, between the net and smartphones, between social and something else we do not yet know. There are numerous declinations of the term “image,” even hybridizations between different types, uses and directions. And photography conveys all these types of images without being what they represent within the medium that put them on view. Moreover, the senses of an image do not depend solely on the author but also renegotiate or bargain from time to time with the users — who in turn belong to different cultural and social contexts and each time will be different at different points and spaces of time — beyond any simplistic one-way reading. We tend to remember images from the specific media form that conveyed them, that made them visible to us for the first time, reworked later in our memory. For Hans Belting, remembering means first releasing images from their original media and then giving them body in our minds. How can we make visible the images that live in our dreams and doubts?