Contemporânea #7

With no historiographical intention, the seventh print issue of Contemporânea puts forward an approach to photography that highlights both the structurally hybrid nature of the medium and the eclecticism of the territory which, after all, has always belonged to it. It is photography as a means with which, among other things, art is produced, as Susan Sontag lucidly argued, that we stress in this publication. From Benjamin's problematisation of photography as art to Sontag's art as photography, several artists have, since the 1960s–70s, developed a photographic writing that problematises the notions of art and work of art. By contaminating the prevailing purism of modernist heritage, photography (just like video) would become the instrument from which art would reflect upon itself.