When photography first came into being, anxious to copy down reality, even the invention of photographic science – with its black and white tones, a product of chance and the limited photo-sensitive chemical techniques available at the time – showed that photography in itself was an unrealistic representation. The more it strives to copy reality, the more it distances itself from it, and has done so from the beginning.

One of humanity’s first photographs that remains preserved to the present day was that taken by Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) around 1826. An object as large and static as a house required an exposure of 8 hours to enable Niépce to fix the image onto the cliché-verre. The building is unmoving, but the ground spins. The light entering from both sides of the photo gives the impression of two suns existing simultaneously.

The development of science and of photographic art has allowed us to view things invisible to the naked eye, from the beating of a bee’s wings, to stars billions of light years away, to the form of the bacteria. Such things become comprehensible because photography transports us into a world of dreams, which do not exist in themselves, but which reflect the reality of a practical world devoid of poetic meaning. The artist makes material objects his own and creates works of art out of them, images to make up for this failing.

Artists have not waited until now, with digital photography in common usage, to take the ownership of objects and make them serve their dreams. Almost 100 years ago, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) created a scandal in New York’s artistic scene by attempting to display a urinal baptised “Fountain” at the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition in 1917. The exhibition’s advertising was kept neutral, and it was supposed to accept all the works, but the organisers took the action of refusing “Fountain”, provoking general uproar amongst the Dadaists and Duchamp’s resignation from his position as a director of the Society of Independent Artists.

With “Fountain”, Duchamp modified art’s central role, which would no longer be the expression of the real, but its intellectual interpretation and he found his biggest supporters amongst those photographers. Later, “Fountain” would become available for public viewing thanks to Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)’s photograph, whose publication would be accompanied by an article extolling Duchamp’s inventive spirit. Following the example of the latter, Man Ray (1890-1976) would also begin to take random objects or create unreal objects and invent photographic processes in order to make images based on these objects, then present them as works of art. He stated: “My goal was never to fix my dreams, but to have the determination to realize them”.

Almost a century would pass between the chance photo taken by Niépce and Man Ray’s deliberate creation before photography would manage to escape its artisan form to become an art. In less than 20 years, modern digital methods have provided plastic artists with the best means for exploring that vague space between the abstract and the representation. As Man Ray underlined, “There has been no artistic progress, just as there has been none in the sexual domain. Art has quite simply found other means of expression.” Taking over readymade images or fabricating new images is no longer important in itself. What is important is the artist’s CHOICE and the DE CISION that he takes and the permanent existence of voids to fill with his dreams.