According to Baudrillard
A real photograph, according to Baudrillard, should not pretend to a resemblance to reality or strive to faithfully reproduce a certain situation. Reality itself is not static and nor mechanical, it is in constant motion. Baudrillard writes about the need for a shift in focus to overcome formalization and cliché. The photographic image can become a directly imprint of this dynamic, for example, when using diffusion or defocusing techniques: “Fortunately, the world has never will be in exact focus (check your quote, there seems to be a word or two missing here) ... And only that image will be true, which takes into account this trembling of the world, whether it be a situation or an object, whether it is a military photograph or a still life, a landscape or a portrait, an art photograph or a reportage. At this stage, the image is part of the world, captured in the process of becoming... The focus is on
absence, but not presence... To separate the real from the principle reality. Separate the image from the principle of representation” [3]. Baudrillard uses a kind of apophatic language to describe an event, which the photograph is intended to capture and which certain properties cannot be attributed to him in any way: “... photography gives an account of what the world is like in our absence" [2, p. 225]; “... the object must be caught in that single fantastic the moment of first contact, when things had not yet noticed us, when absence and emptiness have not yet dissipated” [3]. The philosopher, to a certain extent, develops ideas close to iconoclastic tendencies of modern thought about art, compares the term “absence” with the problems of iconoclasm, compares a photographic print-negative
with the image on the shroud, the only acceptable image for the Byzantine iconoclasts, who denied the rest remaining iconographic images as secondary, “man-made” “pseudo-likeness”: “The act of photographing was and is “not made by hands”.
Mechanical fixation of light, in which neither ideology participates, nor reality. Photography, thanks to this mechanicalness, can serve as a prototype of the literalness of the world without human intervention.
"A world that reproduces itself as a radical illusion, as a pure imprint, without imitation, without human intervention…” [3].
Baudrillard's statements in which he draws attention to independent expressiveness of photography correspond with the concept of W.J.T. Mitchell, an art critic involved in the discussion.
These are around discussions are concerned with the problematics of the “visual turn”. Mitchell considers it necessary to shift the emphasis from the allegorical and semiotic interpretation of the image, according to which the image dictates a certain reading to the viewer, to its metaphorical and expressive aside: “Images certainly have some power, but they can be much weaker than we think. Our task is to clarify and complicate our ideas about the extent of their power and how it functions. That's why I'm asking a question not about what pictures do, but about what they want, thereby shifting the focus from power to desire, from the model of the dominant force, which needsresist, on the model of a subordinate who is worth interrogating or, better, who should be given the floor ... Pictures do not want to be interpreted, deciphered, idolized, destroyed pity, exposed or demystified, and do not want to enslave watching” [8]. W.J.T. Mitchell believes that the image is irreducible to the language, sign, otherwise the image is endowed with an uncharacteristic the power to manipulate the viewer through additional, connotative meaning. In fact, the images "do not want, to be reduced to a "history of images” or elevated to a "historical art" - they want to be perceived as complex individualities having many subjective positions and identities. They would like to deal with a hermeneutics that would returned to the original gesture of Panofsky's iconology, before how he developed his method of interpretation. Panofsky said, stated that the first encounter with a painting is like meeting on the street with an "acquaintance" who "greets me by taking off his hat" [eight].
To the excessive overload of the artistic image of the interpretation and narrative strategies, from sociological to Freudian, S. Sontag also points out, using the term "transparency" close to Baudrillard's term "truthfulness". By the latter, she understands the reorientation of art criticism to the analysis of the emotional component of the image and not the abstract the meaning of the image, on empathy instead of explanation [9].