That the latest studies on photography came out when this discipline had finally been admitted into the field of visual arts after many years in which such an acknowledgement was considered highly debatable, brings up the fundamental question of its semiotic status. Although an ever-increasing number of photographers participated in the most important contemporary art exhibitions such as the Biennale in Venice during the Seventies, the traditional idea of the ‘photograph’ as a mere recording and reproduction of the visible, given the subject’s pre-existent representation as bystander (thus with the added value of its ‘truthfulness’ legitimising its use as  ‘proof’ in judicial and scientific contexts), was undermined by an artistic reading of the photograph as a ‘sign’ endowed with its own specific autonomy and with its independent existence as an object.

New technologies (so new by now that, in their turn, they have become ‘forerunners’ of technological progress) have made this difficult achievement possible, creating for up-dated photographers further opportunities to question the means used and the possibilities of visual experiences.

Carlo Cantini and Roberto Pupi have given life to an intense visual process of reflection on the possibilities of experiential projection, expanding the art of photography towards the future.  Each, in his own manner, has worked on extending the virtual space of the photograph traditionally closed inside the “frame”, the space which Leon Battista Alberti theorised as the ‘scene’  of the picture in its dimension of effective plasticity. Cantini envisages his images as anamorphic projections which break through the restrictions of the frame: a horizontal violence of a (peaceful and gentle) image. Pupi projects his images with an imaginative, jutting plasticity, thereby invading the critical space of the spectator.

This is about imagining what will happen to photography...

Francesco Galluzzi