Poetics of the unfolded images. at the opening of Etienne Samain's Indian photographic patrimony

• Grant number: 11/11958-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2011
• End date: October 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Visual Communication
• Principal Investigator: Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal
• Grantee: Fabiana Bruno
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The actual project puts forward the study of a photographic patrimony produced about 30 years ago by Etienne Samain, anthropologist and epistemologist of visual communication. The study will be conducted under the light of recent contributions to a science of the image (1) and in the context of an anthropology of communication.The photographic documentary patrimony will be presented through the view of its author-producer and will embody a functional source susceptible to think about the questions pointed by Hans Belting, an art historian who was convinced that the image can only be understood through an anthropological and communicative approach. The heuristic and poetic exploration of this patrimony aims at going even deeper incorporating, this time, some big axis of Georges Didi- Huberman's contemporary reflection on the image. If the images of Etienne Samain patrimony evoke, in the present, a media of preservation and restitution, the analysis of this patrimony/record of documentary characteristics aims to understand the image-document as being a part of the metalinguistic poetics. Thus, if it is true that this group of images carries a history and its memories (with their permanences, survivals and changes), the images that will be chosen and assembled in the making of a visual atlas will reveal that they are a form of exposure of the thought and imagination (this one in the concept of Walter Benjamin, as being the builder, par excellence, that only disassembles the continuity of the things to make emerge from this better structural affinities) (2).(1) I refer to the idea of bildwissenschaft (the science of the image) suggested by Hans Belting, but above all, to the contributions of Georges Didi-Huberman who in the lineage of the father of the modern iconology sets up an inauspicious art: at the same time philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, poetics and politics of the image.(2) Consult Didi-Huberman, Georges. Devant Le temps. Histoire de l'Art et Anachronisme des images. Paris: Éditions de Minuit: 2004, p.124. (AU)