According to G. Ryle, the power of a shot is its ability to trigger the imagining process, through which I seem to be seeing the persons and things that are in the picture, as if they were in front of my nose, though they are not there and the whole situation may be long since disappeared .

 

Among other things, what these words bring into question is the myth of objective immediacy,  still too often attributed to Photography, i.e. the idea that what gives a shot its meaning is its purported direct and intimate relationship with reality, rather than the function it performs within the cognitive and emotional contexts of our practices, and which substantially consist in " a stimulus to imaging" as Ryle puts it (G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Penguins 1978 p 240 ).

 

 

In my projects I try to explore Photography as a language and identify the structures of this language, that is the structures that give us the power to confer meaning to what, in the end, is but impressions of light recorded on a chemical or digital support.

 

Resorting to a  “grammar of seeing” of some kind, which is complex, multifarious and public the same way as the language is, we can photographically render even our emotional reactions and make them communicable.