Abstract

This essay aims to appreciate the evolution of the problems regarding the ontological understanding of the photographic image and its derivative, the film, in the face of the sophistication of the apparatus of its production. The creative freedom in making images through optical machines is inversely proportional to their credibility as documents. Since its appearance in the human landscape, as a cultural object, the technology of recording images with lights has brought with it a complex of aporias about what would the nature of the image produced by cameras be: a document or an artistic object, intentionally produced and with created meaning? Consequently: are they denotative or, necessarily, connotative? The development of automatic image capture in the 1980s represented the first update of the question. To what extent, and for how long, will it be possible to trust photography and film as documents through which man aims to access reality? The question now seems to be settled, definitively, in the face of the invention of artificial photography made by algorithms.