Contrast: Photography in Higher Education is a publication that was born from a need felt by many and that its authors understood to be an imperative: to make known the role and the importance that the teaching and practice of photography has today in Portuguese higher education schools of art, design, architecture and also of what we generically call artistic studies. Despite the multiple differences between these different photography courses – in their genesis and history, in their insertion in the university or polytechnic context, in their programmatic purpose and pedagogical organization and, finally, in their greater or lesser scientific autonomy or relative weight in their respective curricula – one can verify, above all, their omnipresence in artistic education. The verification of such omnipresence and the surprise that it may constitute, through this publication, reveals how much it is, after all, a discrete omnipresence.

If these “fabulous images, creatures of the moment”, in the words of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), have always been figures of our amazement, to paraphrase Pedro Miguel Frade (1960-1992), through the texts published here and, above all, through the photographic projects revealed, it becomes much more understandable why, increasingly, all around us, authorial photography seduces young creators and demonstrates a vigor and bravery – through the technical and conceptual quality of the images that are created – that we haven’t seen for many years.

Almost celebrating its two hundredth anniversary, the old invention reveals a continuous capacity for self-renewal and, above all, for transformation of our gaze and, therefore, of our role and place as visual subjects. Mediated by photography, the vision we have of ourselves and the world is, therefore, always uncertain, incomplete and unstable – but also frequently surprising. لعبة روليت للايفون For example, when it appears before our eyes as one of those extraordinary moments when the old magic (or illusion) of instantaneity and verisimilitude – truthful or fabricated – captures our attention and, with it, our consciousness. كيف تربح المال من الإنترنت Entangled once again in these “fabulous images” we believe we see more and see better. Above all, to see far beyond our usual visual worlds.

Through the window that is thus opened, we are led, transported, in an escape or, simply, in a journey that so often, without us realizing it, not only changes our place and moment, without the here and now suffering any alteration, but changes in us the consciousness of space and time. And, in this way, the very idea of who and how we are.

In an age when photography has established a visual paradigm, paved the way for new and increasingly complex technologies of visual creation, reproduction, and diffusion, radically transformed our daily lives, created a fiercely visual modern culture, and made all of us not just observers but creators of images, to be this discreet omnipresence is perhaps the greatest and most complete example of its triumph. So isn’t it time for our art histories and other broad cultural narratives to change as well? لعبة بلاك جاك For historical research, thought, and criticism of photography to no longer live in an almost parallel, often watertight world, but to become inseparable components of the complex and varied fabric of human creation? Without much fuss, discreetly, but absolutely radically?