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Textos: Diferentes autores
Fotos: @ Eduardo Ruigómez

This does not mean that art photography despise the ease with which images can be produced nowadays. Some photographers, critics or cultural managers may do just that, but it is a wrong option. On the contrary, one has to celebrate that more people have the material conditions to produce photos. The experience of other arts may help us understand this: for example in music, where there is a tendency to dissolve the gap that formerly existed between classical and popular music; today Winston Marsalis chooses to dedicate himself to jazz and abandons the interpretation of baroque music, Pink Floyd is as highly appreciated by musicians as Saint Martin on the Fields and Renée Fleming sings spirituals if it suits her. And this is no new phenomenon; let us remember Stravinsky, Shostakovich, etc. Nowadays anyone can compose electronic music; there are programs for that. In literature the phenomenon is old and began with Cervantes and Shakespeare. The same with dance, theatre and so many other artistic expressions.

Coincidentally, the visual arts have been more reluctant to erase the frontiers between the erudite and the popular, between art and daily life. From its beginnings art photography has tried to raise walls of isolation, distinguishing itself from the “other photography”.

Stieglietz already tried to find acceptance for photography promoting a salon art, using the paradigm of painting. Musea contribute with their politics to celebrate artists and galleries with the craze of unique or limited or numbered copies and managers with their demands of exclusivity. The mannerism of photography schools goes in the same direction.

One has to acknowledge that photography has done some attempts to cross barriers, but unfortunately they have not always been accompanied by the profundity and quality of the other arts. In the attempts to incorporate Polaroids, Lomos, out-of-focus, crossed or daily life, there are some very promising achievements, but also a lot of copying, shortcuts, lack of skills and technique, irrelevant topics and lack of construction of a solidly structured language, able to oppose the prevailing academicism.

What do we need for this? Three ingredients are essential: One, demanding means of diffusion with independent strategies to counteract the existing ones. It is necessary to construct a complex system of reproduction, diffusion, criticism, discussion, commercializationbased on various initiatives to reach thelargest amount of people who haveinterest in thesubject. This magazine is a contribution to

that, it is not alone but the whole of these initiatives, of which we are a part, is still far from attaining a leadership to reorient photography towards less frivolous and conformist objectives than the prevailing ones.

Two: that the individual experiences of the photographer and the closeness to local and daily life are not dissolved into the irrelevant, in a superficial populism or in tedious repetitions. Criticism, discussion and conceptualization are the tools to attain this.

Three: some committed photographers, with a high technical quality and artistic sensibility, and the ability to establish directions building bridges between art photography and the images that only intend to register daily experiences. They exist; we have even seen some of them in this magazine. Easy access to the means to make photographs is a first step to increase this contingent of photographers.

Taking up the initial question again, the “democratization” of photography and today’s easy access do not improve its quality, but they do open up opportunities to speed up the permanent changes and mutations that are needed to keep photography alive.