Bibliografia selecionada:

Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. 2008

Introduction; ch. 2/3/7

P.101: Photography provides modern citizens with an instrument enabling them to

develop and sustain civilian skills that are not entirely subordinate to
governmental power and allows them exercise partnership with others
not under the control of this power or acting as the extension of
this powers operations and goals. In other words, photography is
one of the distinctive practices by means of which individuals can
establish a distance between themselves and power in order to observe its actions and
to do so not as its subjects.
P107: Photography, we should remember, is foremost a mass instrument for the mass
production of images, which is not susceptible to monopolization. 42 () To see more
than they could alone, individuals had to align themselves
with other individuals who would agree to share their visual
field with one another. Photography reorganized what was accessible
to the gaze, in the course of which everyone gained the opportunity
to see through the gaze of another. In order to create this
economy of gazes, each and every one had to renounce his or her
right to preserve his or her own, autonomous visual field from external
forces, but also acquired an obligation to defend the gaze in order
to make it available for others to enter and intermingle. This was primarily
the individuals renunciation of ownership of his or her
image or point of view, just as he or she was prepared to give away
that image or to become one. Photography, then, broadened the limits
of the gaze to encompass a mixed economy of gazes that continually
flood the visual field with new data. This mass production of
images offered to the gaze is not carried out from a centralized location.
It is not synchronized or controlled by a sovereign power. It is
performed in different places and by different people who are bound
together in civil association on account of photography, but not necessarily
with any explicit connection on the basis of a nation, race, or gender. With few
exceptions, the mass production of images takes
place unabated. Photographers turn into photographed individuals,
and vice versa.
p.115: Mute at its inception, the photograph maintained its silence. Such silence,
which can sometimes scream to the heavens, attests to the fact that it is our historic
responsibility not only to produce photos, but to make them speak. Photography
granted moderns the opportunity to be naturalized in their world
to know it, investigate it, contemplate it from various angles, bring it
closer or distance themselves from it, critique it, and find answers.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977

in Plato's Cave; The Heroism of Vision; Photographic Evangels; The ImageWorld

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1980