What we have inherited from 20th-Century art, both in its modernist and postmodernist or –if one prefers– in its avant-garde or post-avant-garde paradigms, is a dead weight: an opposition to realism, or at least with the term.

This tradition held that realism is incompatible with the basic features of what creative work and thinking in art is supposed to achieve: a distance toward reality itself, which art is not supposed to reproduce but to contest, to transform, and to supersede. Realism appears to go against the grain of a contemporary refusal of the canonical ways of presenting and representing (perspective in painting, narrative in literature, melody in music, and so on).

Art should be a constant challenge to explore the boundaries of the not yet known and realism does not seem to serve this project. Realism, therefore, was often relegated to the museum of –in the eyes of current thinking– pre-modern styles and devices, safely locked in the toolbox of 19th-Century art history. On the other side innovative art tended to be discarded and debunked as fetishistic, anti-social and even anti-democratic.

This aert history tradition is a dead weight because realism stood for a photographic realism’: the 19th-Century model of detail realism as the production of a mechanical replica. instead of one realism, a full-fledged history of variegated and competing meanings, interpretations and assessments of the concept of realism.It is a dead weight because it denied the possibility of innovation and realism; a seeking to understand the social reality by critically ‘making images and notes of it. In this middle ground, there is a multiformity of ways in which the photograph manifests itself in diverse artistic practices today and this has consequences for photography’s critical potential.

n the Introduction to the Time and Photography issues of Image and Narrative it is stated that:

In recent years, the research on the temporal aspects of photography has modified dramatically our conception of photography. At a theoretical level, the idea of photography as being primarily a “slice of time” (snapshot, decisive moment) has been deconstructed and replaced by a more complex vision in which time and space interact. At a practical level, artists, practitioners and scholars have rediscovered the more ‘spatial‘ forms of photographing (panorama photography, photo finish photography, strip photography). More generally speaking, we are now moving away from a vision of photography that is determined by pictorial models, both historically (photography is no longer the little sister of painting) and technically (photography has freed itself from the model of Western perspective).