This course is an introduction to the philosophical-theoretical approach to "Photography". We will investigate the conditions of possibility of thought that enabled the birth of photography in the early 19th century, the mechanisms, disciplines and concepts that brought photography to make the most major "turn" in human life, of modern thinking and of political action. What is the relationship between photography and science, photography and citizenship? And, in particular, we would like to understand how photography discourses, helped to create the radical changes in thought and actions of modern art.
At the center of the course will stand the question of representation, with relation to the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin and Heidegger, which will create the general language of the new media of photography. Following them, we will learn also the postmodern thought about photography and image, thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida, Flusser, Ranciére and Azoulay, who knew how to think photography within reality, within political and social changes. These philosophers will allow us to discuss the nature of the image, and the paradox of representation - how we learn to understand and live with an image that is "virtual", which is no more than a "simulacra", that convinced us to believe we live in more than one reality at the time, live parallel lives together with a lot of other people, and to create together what is called now "The wisdom of the crowd".