One might wonder if, nowadays, competitions dedicated to photography still make sense. More than fair question, and the answers could be multiple, depending on the mission and the particular structure that informs the individual award.

Every critic who works with contemporary photography certainly has his own well-defined vision, even if it is open to new contaminations. Although it lives in a post-Marshall Mcluhan era and the sources of the art scout have greatly increased compared to a few decades ago (think of the enormous possibilities of mass media related in particular to the Internet)Awards are still a great means of broadening the cultural debate. In particular, working with the Artelaguna prize, I had the opportunity to reflect on authors from about sixty countries of the world, thus having an overview indicative of the creativity of a good portion of the earth. The contact with different ways of conceiving the photographic expression, bearers of a very varied cultural background, has led me to numerous meditations. At the end of the selection, in fact, perhaps some of my convictions about the trend of contemporary research have even changed. Such an event, in the end, can only be an opportunity for exchange and reflection between the authors involved, but also between fellow curators, putting in place a very recent scouting work aimed at young authors, or less young, who are not sufficiently valued by the traditional mechanisms of the art system.

The scholar who wants to have a careful look at the situation of contemporary photography, must ask himself a series of questions, without disregarding some historical and cultural issues. These are also evident by rushing through the history of photography in a hasty and incomplete way as an expressive and cultural form, and in particular taking as an example some events that have created relationships between the young photographic medium and the now adult Western artistic aesthetics.

Already in the title of this text, I admit and announce that mine is an arbitrary and incomplete reconstruction, has not at all the crisis of the historical excursus, but it is simply the exposition of some salient points, useful to my way of reasoning about photography.

Over a century and a half ago, in an Italian magazine, an article appeared that, in vague terms, announces a new way of conceiving art. In the privileged gazette of Milan, dated January 15, 1839 (which echoed a news report that appeared a week earlier in the Moniteur Parisien), it was written:"... is a revolution in the art of drawing (...) because through the process in question, nature itself will be reproduced in the blink of an eye, without the cooperation of man’s hand."

In this way, and with little awareness, the birth of photography is announced. Already from the few words of the anonymous chronicler we understand that, on the one hand there is a positive cultural climate and, on the other, it is inevitable that this process has undergone a relationship with the arts in the broad sense.

Throughout its history photography has had a peculiar relationship with the visual arts, certainly based on mutual exchanges, interference, and a rivalry often exasperated in an almost grotesque way by a militant critic.

It is inevitable to think that one of the reasons for the initial affirmation of photography was precisely the need for correct historical documentation of the masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Photography is used by the intellectuals who make the so-called grand tour, that is the exploration trips to discover the masterpieces of our beautiful country. With the new medium they could capture the signs of the ancient civilizations of the peninsula, but also the masterpieces of the great Italian painting. Just think of the meticulous photographic work of John Ruskin and his collection of daguerreotypes performed in large numbers also in Venice. It creates a cultural enthusiasm in which historians become a kind of adventurers.

After this period of experimentation, already at the end of the nineteenth century, there is a first massification of the medium. Thanks to increasingly simple devices, there is a widening of the base of people who can photograph, but the quality of the results, of course, is affected.

Just in this period emerges pictorialism, a way of conceiving photography that has authors in various European countries. In particular, many are amateurs, that is, non-professional people (we do not think about today’s term, they are not just amateurs) who dare to experiment, through transgressions made possible by the lack of commercial ends. For these authors the intellectual thread that binds them to art is clear.

They want to tend to the artisticity of the medium, trying to reproduce at a photographic level the suggestions of the pictorial data. Despite many excesses (which lead to sterile outcomes), it also results in works of absolute quality.

Today it may seem trivial to attest to the aesthetic value of the medium, but it has not always been so.

Turning attention to the avant-garde, one could take as an example the manifesto of futurism of 1909. Some signatories of the document, including Umberto Boccioni, were sceptical about the new medium. Only the younger Bragaglia brothers did not consider the photo as a mere medium, but as a new and transgressive linguistic hypothesis.

Even after the "case" Bragaglia, the true meteor of the landscape, in our country there was always a return to more "domesticated" trends. A context that, following the First World War, will be dominated in the visual arts by the so-called return to order and photography will see the need to find a functionality. This marks the birth of great authors of photojournalism, but at the same time removes the spirit from real research, keeping them outside the European and American cultural debate.

Not to mention that in the period after the Great War and with the consequent affirmation of the fascist totalitarian regime, the photographic expression is used for purely propaganda purposes. In those years one of the great problems of the Italian situation was affirming, that is, a series of links with the reproduction of fashion, architecture and design, which has positive aspects, but also strongly harmful. In particular, the fact that the action of the photographic medium extended in several directions is appreciable.

The great misunderstanding, however, comes from the fact that these functional uses are mistaken for a research endowed with an intrinsic aesthetic and therefore, wrongly, branded as a true cultural investigation. A significant step forward in the awareness of the expressive potential, going beyond the empirical side of experimentation, comes from the theoretical research of the following years that produces a significant deepening on aesthetics, the philosophical sense of photography.

The post-war period in Italy is a melting pot of initiatives, but above all of new diatribes; if in the pictorial field there is the ideological contrast between abstract needs and realism, even the photographic one is torn, because of attitudes that, in a dogmatic (and hasty) wayBy historiography they mean modernist positions on the one hand and neo-realist positions on the other.

It must be emphasized that from the sixties and seventies onwards, also thanks to an opening of our country to international experiences, the debate intensifies and takes on a greater breath. Some aesthetic problems, previously unknown, are gradually addressed and thus the basis for today’s research. Symptomatic of this are the ways in which some great authors understand the value of the research they carry out. Ugo Mulas makes photos that have the theme of photography itself, in order to understand the intrinsic value. The time of circles and the myth of American photography has now passed; it should also be noted that the world of photography becomes the medium of expression for authors who are not properly photographers. We think, for example, of some artists of the Arte Povera such as Giuseppe Panone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giulio Paolini, but also of the Roman Mario Schifano. New relationships are born and develop between the field of visual artistic research in the strict sense and photography, which will lead, in the following decades, the affirmation of several generations of photographers today considered the masters of our time.

A brief historical excursus, necessarily incomplete, but functional to a reflection on what were the questions that characterized the photographic research.

Even today part of the Italian criticism speaks of the so-called emancipation of photography of the visual arts. We would like to enshrine a role of total autonomy with respect to other expressions. In a historiographical perspective, these positions could appear to have been founded at other times in the debate. Today, in a clear and consolidated way, but in reality since the sixties, art has been undergoing an irreversible process of intermediation. The distinction of the medium is something limiting for an author, who certainly may have a greater adherence to one language rather than another, but it is not possible to set limits to expression. Not wanting to go so far as to say that photography becomes the delight of artists in the broad sense, I think I can reiterate that today’s photographer, who pursues an artistic research and not only documentary or commercial, A number of questions need to be asked. In particular, as with other expressions, you need to have a clear understanding of your time. Photography is the daughter of a series of social issues that become essential, because they reflect an aesthetic sense of today. It is not possible to think of a discipline that acts in a way detached from its context. Any production of the culture of the present is inextricably linked to historical, social, philosophical, anthropological and artistic factors, which even photography cannot escape.