Image, displacement and resistance: photography as a field of tension and transformation

Abstract

Photography has never been merely a passive record of reality. It is a field of disputes, displacements, and reinventions, where history, art, politics, and affect intersect. The portfolios and articles published in this issue reveal how the photographic image transcends its materiality to become a critical device, capable of questioning hegemonic narratives, subverting traditions, and reconfiguring our relationship with time, memory, and space. In this issue, Antonio Anson invites us to reflect on displacement as a central axis for understanding the transformation of images. When visuality renounces linear narration, the avant-gardes emerge, replacing history with discourse — a gesture radicalized by conceptual art, converting the object into word, matter into idea. This movement does not eliminate the image but rather puts it under tension, demanding from the viewer an active stance, capable of deciphering layers of meaning beyond the visible. Thus, necessarily, an art of seeing displaces the gaze and the viewer’s axis, positioning them also as a site of concept. Wagner Souza e Silva reminds us that photography is, above all, vibration. By bringing light and sound closer together, he reveals its performative nature, especially in digital contexts, where images pulse on screens, resonating as affective compositions. This perspective prompts us to ask: isn’t photography also a score, a writing of frequencies and silences? In contrast to conceptual abstraction, Aline Gomes presents the work of Alair Gomes, whose erotic and collaborative portraits of young European men reinvent classical tradition. His flâneur gaze captures not just bodies, but desires and complicities, turning the street into a stage for a constructed intimacy. Here, photography becomes encounter — a game of seduction between the photographer and the photographed. Sofia Borges radicalizes this discussion by photographing photographs, destabilizing the notion of originality. Her work operates as a visual rhapsody, where fragments are recombined into new narratives, questioning the very history of art. By evoking “Sounds of Marble,” she confronts us with the inaudible — the silence of classical sculptures, now re-signified through the lens. In the same spirit of intervention, my “contribution” to the Corps à corps exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) proposes a digital rhinoceros as a protest against the Eurocentrism of museum collections. Here, the fable is a call for disobedience: art must invade, disturb, question the canons. Paula Cabral, in turn, buries photographs to explore Freud’s Unheimliche — the uncanniness of what was once familiar. Her “anti-portraits” are traces of decomposing identities and liquid affections, powerful metaphors for contemporary migrations and uprootings. Fábio Gátti revisits Barthes and his search for the lost mother in photography, reminding us that the image is also mourning and Týkhe (chance). The ça-a-été (“that-has-been”) is not just an index of the real, but a gesture of resistance against forgetting. Finally, Isis Gasparini and Ronaldo Entler interrogate flânerie in the 21st century: is it still possible to wander contemplatively in accelerated cities? They reveal a methodical effort to resist urban inertia, even when space no longer allows Baudelairean poetic drifting. In the end, they highlight the differentiation of the female gaze in the flânerie process as a matter of gender and feminist affirmation. If there is a thread linking all these works, it is photography as a political act — whether through displacement, vibration, protest, or mourning. Through intervention, it forces us to rethink not just what we see, but how we look. In a world saturated with images, perhaps its greatest power lies precisely in making us slow down, question, and, above all, feel.