A territory of our own

Ever since we first came across it, art has allowed us to see a sight enriched with the impression of entering a territory of our own. From its very beginning, art is the visible expression of the passages between images, the making visible of its own laws, its analogies and affinities. Walter Benjamin already shed light on the “auratic” value of such transformations, and while he is known for stating that photography causes a degradation of the aura, it is no less true, though less known, that that loss is redeemed by the aura photography carries in itself. Image’s secret, its potency and splendour, lies precisely in that distance between image and thing, between word and thing. In photography – as a medium inheriting water’s and mirror’s powers of reflection – the leaning over one’s own reflection (the Greeks called it Narcissus) is ‘magi-cally’ reinstated.