Between desires and impossibilities: photography, an apparatus to apprehend and imagine spatiality

Abstract

Photography is part of our daily life. It shapes the ways we apprehend and experience the world. Since its invention, photography has framed our visual culture as well as our spatial knowledge and its organization. It has forged the production and the ways of looking at other images that are employed in order to organize, circulate and teach spatial information. Despite the fact that digital photography opens multiple possibilities, I will argue that it brings forth new impossibilities too. I will trace how the imagination has coped with some of the impossibilities that photography introduced in different periods of time. This exercise may prompt our imaginations to not even expected new possibilities while creating and working with images.