The photography between madness and wakeness

Abstract

The work is essentially devoted to the Barthesian dialectic of madness and tame of photography on a foray into the elements: punctum and studium. To understand the unholy side-poetic-affective-profane of photography, the author resorts to Greek traditions. Beyond the relation with mythology, Fontanari explains the relation that Barthes draws between photography and poetry, specifically haicai, which, like the puctum, evokes silence and plenitude, ceasing the noise of technique, of the reality towards the “affective awareness,” in Barthes’s words. The book is a tribute to the path of the coded image to the unencrypted one; it is a tribute to a poetics of affection and to what is the inexpressible.