Voz en off

Photographs don’t speak, but they make us talk about them. What was silence first, takes on the aspect of eloquence, but we do not quite identify its voices, perhaps our own or perhaps a rumour in the background, an echo of something already heard, a voiceover.
In this essay we are moved by the magic of photographic images. Suspicions about the tricks of photography make us wander through some particular stories that have been articulated about it: the magic of the presence-absence of a loved one (Barthes), the magic that turns a urinal into art (Stieglitz and Duchamp), the magic of someone who was a magician without knowing it (Viéitez) or the magic of complicit fables (Fontcuberta).
We cannot and do not pretend to explain that magic capacity that, in spite of all the stories (or thanks to them), photographs still seem to have. Sharing the perplexity they still produce in us will be enough… and valuable.