“This is not a photograph” (ceci n’est pas…) *

I have chosen a somewhat provocative title to show you that the photography of the nineties has had a strong influence on the evolution of the photography as a "tableau" in contemporary art. I am not going to talk about the history of the relationship between photography and painting. I am rather going to show you that "one photograph may hide another one" or, if you allow me to paraphrase Magritte, to remind you in front of each picture that "this is not a photograph".

However, if it is neither a painting nor really a photograph, what is it? Exhibitions like, among other ones,"Photography after Photography" by Hubertus von Amelunxen or "The betrayal of the model, which Pierre Stiwer, Christian Gattinoni and myself had organized in the context of the European Weeks of Images, but also "Painting without Painting" by Dirk Luckow and Hans Werner Schmid in Leipzig, have all been about this question. 
Ever since its invention, photography has had an ambiguous relationship with painting. At first it was “ a very humble servant to the arts” according to Baudelaire, who only vaguely recognized its artistic value, although it was already part of what he considered as modern because it could capture contemporary life. Then, in turns source of inspiration and inspirer, photography has nowadays become one of the major media within the field of the visual arts.
But can it be confined to a “tool” of the arts ? Have we not moved from the influence of photography on painting, to the pictorial practice of photography? Painters in particular have chosen photography for both its capacity to capture facts and create fiction. The dual nature of photography, first as a recording instrument of reality and as an instrument of fiction as a result of its possiblities to recompose and reframe its subject, which it shares with painting, has given it the complexity which also makes it specific. Hence it has been a follower, over the century, of formalist tendencies, a supporter of representation and more recently a defender of art as a social and relational practice. Its dual nature came to express itself in the dematerialization of the work of art notably in the objective neutrality of minimalist and conceptual tendencies of Victor Burgin but also in the return to painting, in Cindy Sherman’s baroque and phantasmagoric set pieces or in its relationship with ritual and the body’s theatricality as in Arnulf Rainer’s work. By becoming a kind of middle ground accommodating fiction and document, personal mythologies and mass culture, photography has overcome the crisis of representation while at the same time becoming more strongly integrated  into the visual arts, having acquired a status which may allow us to consider it as a "post-painting art" so to speak.
Photography as used by painters has not only been a fertile ground for questioning perception and representation but it has also led to the abandonment of more traditional categories of expression.
Even before the computer age, photography took advantage of its many ways of manipulating the image and the ease with which it could mix media made it possible to consider it on the same level as painting and cinema.
In his work entitled “Uncompleted”, José Calvelo casts doubt on the objectivity and representational accuracy of photography. He subverts representational hierarchies by staging a crime scene where one can see an armed female warden shining her torch onto a masked intruder crouching in front of an unfinished Picasso. Contrary to painting, photography manages to put things at a distance, because it is "outspoken", because it enables us to get to the very core of vision and allows the the viewer to be mirrored in the act of viewing.
Photography is often used as a pretext for disclosing the complexity of representation and questioning the status of the work of art. Pep Agut achieves a nice and subtle comparison between different forms of representation in his 1992 diptych “Without title”. The illusion of reproduction is betrayed several times within the picture of a landscape by Jeff Wall which is nothing but a page from a magazine opening onto the world like a window.
Further reflections about the fundamental principles underlying a picture, and more specifically about the “photographic” and “what can be photographed” have been made over the last twenty years by Paul Pouvreau. His series entitled “Battles”, with its reference to the painter Uccello, done in the 80s, was already characterized by quotations from the cinema and the question about the very nature of photography. In his more recent works reality and its signifier are placed side by side in a kind of staged photography where the photographic objectivity is continuously questioned. This illustrates, in a rather playful way, the relation between artist, representation, work of art and artistic genres.
But photography has not only dealt with its own particular nature and the position it assumes in contemporary art, as Danto sees it. It also has allowed a redrawing of the borders of artistic pratice or, as in the case of Istvan Balogh, for revisiting and recycling the iconography of painting. His allegorical photographs put saints in a contemporary context or call forth archetypes of art history which are then subverted ( by quoting Bruce Nauman, for example)
Patrick Tosani’s more formalist approach allows him to take on the very object by facing it according to tradition but in order for the suject to become “the photographic object” he has to "conceptualise" it. Composition and enlargement make the objects look huge as they become architectural structures. Besides the formal and tactile aspects of his photography there is always Tosani’s concern for the transfer from real space to photographic space which makes him a designer or a constructor. Paradoxically, the picture is not simply a "proof of evidence" but it becomes a sculpture or even an object. Objectivity supported by an extreme visual quality is what characterises  the works of these young artists who ponder on the representation of reality, which means that photography functions as a record of reality while being at the same its fiction. In another vein one has to mention the work of younger artists who use photography, freed from these constrains, to play with the notions of concept without neglecting sensibility or even emotion for that matter.

More than other art forms, photography allows to record,  or freeze the time of the relationship between the artist and his/her model, through capturing emotions or concepts. Increasingly used within the field of contemporary art, it subverts its models, questions the paradoxical nature of the creative process,  the concept of art as a process, of art as a commodity, thus taking us beyond the recollections of images.
Before being a nice picture or even a nice piece of art with indisputable pictorial qualities, photography nowadays represents and documents a relationship. It is the visible sign of a concept, of an idea. It is situated between representation and dematerialisation as in the series by Marylène Negro and Klaus Scherübel entitled “Artists at Work”. These often fairly large prints show the couple discussing, thinking or at rest. They are pictures of small things, of slightly staged situations, but also of archetypal behaviour.
Artists today,  as opposed to their predecessors who were still engaged in the process of redefining the medium,  have  learned more easily to come to grips with this loss of reference as they have moved beyond the scope of photography by expanding within the frontiers of multi-media practice.
But what about the photographic nature of contemporary art today, when the visual arts can no longer be defined in relation to a medium but rather in relation to a concept ?
Perhaps the way in which artists nowadays use and produce photography has allowed art to fuse with life; it has probably also contributed towards dematerializing the work of art as such. In fact, as Nicolas Bourriaud says in his book"L'esthétique  relationelle" it is perhaps photography which might be held responsible for the proliferation of screens in contemporary exhibitions. 
In 1917 Duchamp, rejecting painting and using photography as a weapon against it, wrote to Stieglitz: "I would like photography to make people feel disgusted by painting until the moment when some other thing will make photography unbearable."
Maybe we have not come to this point yet. What if photography had simply, as Heidegger put it, contributed towards "reestablishing us into our original state as witnesses of the heterogeneous nature of reality and as keepers of the being". I would like to conclude by saying that the words which he put as an epigraph to his writings "Wege, nicht Werke" (ways, not works) should be adapted to art as it exists today. A lot of artists certainly are on this way.   
Excerpt from the conference
Paul di Felice

*from Magrittes’ painting “ceci n’est pas une pipe”