Practising and teaching the arts were two fields in constant transformation over the last half century. Artistic practice – and saying so is almost commonplace – was reformed numerous times throughout the twentieth century, absorbing many other forms of object and image production, but also incorporating many questions from other fields of knowledge production, permanently raising problems about its borders, its conditions of possibility and its social acuity. None of this is new today, having become a fluid and mobile condition with the concomitant difficulty in establishing criteria or even recognizing any type of specificity. Teaching the arts, as any process of knowledge transfer and procedure, lives in a permanent state of crisis, not only because of its inherent need to build models for a fluid situation, but also because its condition of recreating protocols faces the difficulty of reconciling the rules of academia with the fluidity of what cannot be contained in categories, namely those corresponding to the disciplinary divisions of artistic practices arising from the tradition of the fine arts. 

This condition is already sufficiently complex regarding artistic procedures that have a long critical tradition, such as painting or sculpture. The case of photography is, however, even more severe. Photography has been, since its creation, a possibility of image production imminently linked to representation foremost for a technical reason: its images are produced based on a pre-existence in the world, a configuration of light inscribed upon a medium by processes of lenticular mediation. العاب النت الحقيقيه Teaching photography was a technical procedure, passing along the alchemy of light fixation. 

With the changes inherent to the introduction of digital coding of images, the link between photographic imagery and its model, the cropped visual field, was modified and attenuated. However, the enormous change generated by the democraticity of image production had no parallel in history, not even in the generalization of the graphite pencil in the late 18th century. The changes in the use of the photographic image, its conversion into a code that does not imply its fixation on a medium, the changes with the generalization of its use, the irrelevance of its perpetuity, transformed photography into a means of creating images that does not admit an exterior. تنزيل لعبة روليت  

Contrary to the image-rarefied history until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, dominated by artistic images, the generalization of photography reversed the equation: today, unlike the past, very few images in circulation in the world are artistic images. As only occurred in the past with drawing or the vulgarization of writing, the generalization of photography converged very different practices under this designation: recording, documentation, selfies, visual notes and, of course, poetic notes. 

Teaching photography is therefore a very complex task, especially at the university level, or in higher education. Today it is not merely a question of conveying technical procedures for creating images, but of knowing how to teach the photographic, that is, the gaze that recognizes what can be fixed and, in that fixation, rethink nature and the visibility of the image. Teaching photography is, in its complexity, the possibility of proposing a rethinking of the viability of images and, therefore, a discourse about their ontology. 

That is why the Contrast project, the mapping it produces for the various cases of establishing photography study plans, is timely. In each of these schools, in each of these study plans, the question of its urgency and visibility is systematically at play, the question of the grand ecology of the images of the world, and the possibility of, today, producing a new image, a never before made image. 

Therefore, in the caption-less and scale-less map of the images of the world, this cartography is indispensable. Seeing who does what where, why and for whom. And proposing a dialogue on the actually relevant topics, those arising from a discipline that, not recognising itself, needs to reinvent itself. That needs, above all, to repeatedly question the reason and method of each image, or the possibility even of each image, of each series of images. قمار Teaching photography needs this mantra, the liturgical repetition of the question and, in the meantime, to keep making more images. Teaching, as Contrast demonstrates, can be the field for this questioning, the ethical reflection on the procedure, the method’s practice.