Photography and narrative

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the history of images as a narrative element, focusing on the concept of DISPLACEMENT as a key idea for understanding the transformation of the meaning and form of images over time. The main argument argues that images, including photographic images, showed a place or meaning beyond the images themselves. This is true until the moment when the visual renounces narration, and images, and words too, simply want to be equal to themselves. It is at this moment that the historical avant-garde movements are born, and it is at this moment that the story, the narration, both of words and images, is replaced by discourse, understood as an element that explains the meaning of images and words beyond their presence and materiality. Conceptual art epitomizes this paradigm shift, in which works of art become all words, all discourse, and the value of objects gives way to the value of the subject who looks. The art of making gives way to the art of seeing.