Escribir sobre el rostro. El fin de siglo en sus imágenes
Writing on the face. Images at the fin de siecle

Summary/Abstract: The creation, use, and circulation of the photographic device moved and affected the knowledge of the 19th and 20th centuries, forever modifying our culture and experience; above all, radicalising the crisis of a scopic regimen that - in the terms of Martin Jay or Susan Sontag - structured Western thought from Plato's cave to the present day. This paper aims to explore the intellectual, artistic, and political adventure involved in the creation and journey of photography - its importation - from Europe to the American continent. For that purpose, a route that recovers discursive moments that are considered key in what respects the conceptualisation of the photographic device will be drawn. It will mainly address the way in which writers such as Sarmiento, Martí, Holmberg, and Darío reflected on photography, frequently in opposition to painting, marking, therefore, the limits and the situation of photography inside and outside the artistic field. In this series, the photographic exhibition of the body and, above all, of the face (of anyone, of the Other, of the artist, and of Christ) is presented as a truly unique dimension that exposes paradigms of knowledge and allows us to follow a crisis of the experience and the artistic field in the passage from the 19th to the 20th century. The conclusion points out, in relation to the proposed route, the position avant la lettre of Rubén Darío and the need to deepen the recent new efforts to review his work critically within the framework of the new critical-theoretical context raised by visual studies and philosophies of the image.

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