This work explores photographic materiality as a fundamental characteristic for seeing and understanding photography. Simultaneously present and absent, photography speaks of life and death. Photos are taken with the desire to control the passage of time and deny the inevitability of death, but photography itself proves the passage of time and often outlives the subject represented. This object has the capacity to be present in the symbols that indicate its absence, a characteristic it shares with fetishism. Associated with its materiality and tangibility, this paradox enables photography to become a fetish object itself — an object of connection between reality and fantasy, tangible and intangible. The work is divided into two parts: A theoretical investigation studying photography as an object that is assumed to be constituted of matter and image, an object capable of social interactions, including being a magical object and a fetish. The creation of a set of images that form the Sensitive topographies, which consists of a series of photographic constructions made from the objects that gave rise to this work.
Produced during the research for my master thesis in art, presented at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon.
Reference (in portuguese): Ribeiro, Sónia Mota. 2012. Magical Objects. Photography as an object. Lisbon: FBAUL.
Installation and photography
© Sónia Mota Ribeiro
Available (in portuguese) here.