Vilém Flusser, Per una filosofia della fotografia, 2006

There is still room for human freedom in a world where the image becomes more and more an empty symbol, where technology and machines take over more of our daily life and our thoughts and desires seem to become robotised every day that passes? Starting from this fundamental question, Flusser ventures into the analysis of an impregnable discipline, with blurred outlines, in which the boundary between technique and art, between reproduction and expression, is by definition ambiguous. Reduced to the mere status of duplication of reality, emptied of its primary sense of “reconstruction of the world”, photography is for Flusser the emblem of the dangerous drift that today risks overwhelming human beings: that of being slaves to a technique without foundation. This is the reason for a philosophy of photography: only through its rethinking will man be able to avert the threat of enslavement to machines and restore space to that freedom and sense that in the post-industrial era seems to have lost.