da fotografia enquanto objecto

Tese de mestrado, Arte e multimédia, (Especialização em fotografia), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2012The research developed here aims to assert photographic materiality as a fundamental quality to see and understand Photography. Simultaneously presence and absence, photography speaks to us of life and death. hotographs are taken with the wish to control the passage of time and deny the inevitability of death, but that very same photograph certifies time past and often survives the subject it represents. This object has the capacity to be present in the same symbols that indicate its absence - a quality shared with the fetish. This paradox, associated with photography’s materiality and tangibility, enables it to become itself an object of fetish - object that connects reality and fantasy; tangible and intangible. The present work is both practical and theoretical and it is divided in three major moments. On a first moment, one starts a theoretical investigation on photography as an object constituted of two parts: matter and image; an object capable of social interactions, among which to be a magical and fetishist object. On the second moment one analyses a relevant group of works made by artists that consider Photography’s materiality on their practice. On the third and last part one presents 3 images from the artistic project composed of a series of 10 photographs representing constructions assembled with the photographic-objects that originated this wor