«La fotografía, de la alquimia al algoritmo». Joan Fontcuberta and Juan María Rodríguez

In the current age of fast-paced changes in cultural habits and technological development, photographic images continue to occupy a privileged place in our lives: everyone talks about photography today. But many corpses have been swept under the rug on the path to its brilliant omnipresence. Photography has gone from being a ‘thing’ inherent in industrial society to a ‘non-thing’ in digital society. The mystery of its founding alchemy is giving way to another kind of magic, that of algorithms. All the qualities of images are changing: the prospects of artificial intelligence predict a visual revolution with much more far-reaching consequences than the one that brought about the emergence of the daguerreotype in 1839.

Photographs used to be taken with light, now they are taken with data. And in this transition of astonishment and uncertainty, it is worth surveying the areas in which the camera is still putting up a fight, insofar as this effort helps us to better understand the spirit of our times. Photographic post-truth, dematerialised memory, iconophagy, the construction of identities and the gender perspective in social media, drones and the automation of the gaze, photography as a language between machines, environmental emergencies, post-photography as a symptom of the post-liberal economy, images of war and the war of images…

This book brings together a dozen essays designed as case studies in which Fontcuberta invites the reader to rethink whether the simile of the mirror with a memory is still the defining element of photography or whether, on the contrary, the time has come to go beyond the mirror.