Photography is a reading, not writing .
-Ferdinando Scianna
Since starting to spread all over the photographic invention en 1839 los primeros que reaccionaron fueron los escritores, sorprendidos como sucede siempre ante una novedad tecnológica. Les preocupaba el futuro de la pintura, especialmente el retrato. Es célebre el ensayo que al respecto escribió el poeta Charles Baudelaire.
Viene al caso el asunto porque el 4 de junio próximo se celebrará en Madrid un coloquio justamente sobre esta antigua reflexión sobre la fotografía que de manera muy perturbadora alude al tiempo, la memoria y la muerte.
En el encuentro madrileño, que forma parte del Festival Internacional de Fotografía PhotoEspaña 2009, varios investigadores, poetas, diseñadores gráficos, fotógrafos y escritores, discurrirán sobre las diferentes Perceptions from photography and from the literature. Some of them may refer to what, today, is recognized as a philosophy which focuses on photography and that never before had accumulated so fruitful theories.
The topic can be approached from two perspectives: what the writers have thought about photography and, secondly, the use of photography as a reason or "character" of the stories of not a few novelists and storytellers.
For our pride, we can say that one of the most profound and wise meditation that have been expressed about the picture is Salvador Elizondo. He writes in his essay on Nicéphore Niepce, which since 1882 discovered the principles underlying the science and art of photography.
A 180 years away "from the first arrest visible over time," writes Elizabeth, we realize that without the achievements of Niépce the two notions that underpin the political life and life in general would regard inconceivable: information and communication. They would also be impossible two of the highest offices of state: archiving and propaganda. And in his novel Farabeuf which is in anticipation of an aesthetic, the narrative function that will meet the photo on the representation of a Chinese torture or "chronicle of a moment."
One of the most disturbing Mexican narrators of the moment, Guadalupe Nettel, offered as a first story in his book Petals a story whose character is the son of a photographer who specializes in ophthalmic plastic surgeon. But within this specialization is dedicated only to photograph women lids soon enter the operating room.
Another of our writers, Mario Bellatin, build a Japanese fantasy to imagine such a Nagaoka who was instrumental in the conception of photography. He says from the title: Shiki Nagaoka: a nose of fiction.
also Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel The Painter battles, makes photography a mechanism to intervene in the creation of the artist in front of the canvas.
In The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, there is also a love affair that comes from the contemplation of a chest radiograph.
"Radiography is photography?
In "Visits", a tale of Rodrigo Moya, photography has its place as a trigger for the cruelest of memories.
But surely, at least for the generation of the '60s, one of the most inventive uses of photography as a literary device is a famous story by Julio Cortazar, "Blow the devil." The narrator character uncovers a murky situation to amplify one frame. So Michelangelo Antonioni recognized the fundamental assumption that story of his film Blow Up.
* * * Caution:
"Blow the devil" has also been published as "The beard of the devil" and "The Devil's bullets." Where it says that beards should spit bullets and where it says read drivel.
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