Postmodernism In The XXI Century

Regarding the photography field, the XXI century assisted to a significant change: the overcoming of the difference between pure photographers and artists that use photography for their researches. An evolution already started at the end of 80’s, when some artists started to elaborate images of photographic mould taking a distance from the documentary approach to highlight, instead, the ability of photography of introducing conceptual thematics; thus, shifting from the representation to its interpretation.

Thanks to its propriety of being an instruments apt to the conceptual mediation with the world, the use of the photographic mean allows the artists to actively participate in the rapid and constant evolution of the world. A participation

Thus, if the conceptual released photography from its representative nature in strictly technical terms, has been the advent of postmodernism in the 80’s to catch its multiple potentialities and transform it in the most poliedric language of our times. ‘Postmodernism - underlines Denys Riout - abandons the research for specificity, and exaults plurality, the contamination of the genres. It is a vague concept that groups artistic practices and dissimilar aesthetic positions. (2000; trad. it. 2002, p. 327). Moreover, since postmodern thinking investigates the social role of representation, the arists started to underline its ambiguity among the consumer society, revealing on one hand the rapid and inevitable separation between image and reality, on the other taking distance from one of the fundaments assigned to the artwork: the creative originality. ‘everything can be collected and re-used in another context, everything is on the same level, on an absolute surface that does not entail either ‘out’ or ‘depth’ underlines Elio Grazioli. (1998, p. 294). The artwork as a pure simulacrum, copy without an original source, citation without text, image that completely substituted reality: These are the characteristics of the artwork in the epoch of postmodernism according to the French critique Jean Baudrillard. A logic that sees history as an

The number of artists that adopt photography as an expressive language is constantly increasing, but not unawarely. Everyone tries to elaborate a personal strategy of the gaze necessary to express his own thought trough a precise interpretative code, connected to the need of establish a relationship of direct engaging with the world. Therefore, to the freedom of action brought by postmodernism it adds up, in the last decade of the XXth century, the need of taking part to the production of interpretative criterias of an actively lived reality, made possible by the particular structure of the photographic mean, both materially and conceptually. Is the desire of bringing to life an individual narrative taking sparks from the daily life, reassured in their objective and undebatable dimension. Those materials are then manipulated to express other contents, that transcend even their own representation aiming to deepen the the message conveyed from the image. ‘Is on the level of the message that the artists intervene, regarding at it as a problem, or better problemising every element of communication, the referents, the destinataries, the vehicles.’ Explaines Giorgio