It is often said that an image is the image of something, which implies a certain relationship with the referent, the real world. What is the nature of this relationship? Modern arts, with photography first and foremost, have modified this relationship both in practice and in theory.

Today, all image criticism oscillates between an excessive confidence in this relationship (for example, when Barthes considers photography from the phenomenological angle of "this-has-been") and an excessive suspicion of the consequences of its manipulation (for example, when in a photograph we see nothing but an illusion, a lie produced by the society of the spectacle).

We therefore propose the reflection from a more dialectical, more nuanced perspective, to look for the points of contact that the image, however free and imaginative it may be, can establish with reality.

Georges Didi-Huberman

Georges Didi-Huberman He is a philosopher and art historian, and currently a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Socials in Paris. Among his publications it is worth highlighting When the images take position (II International Essay Prize) Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2008), Survivance of lucioles (2009) Atlas. How to carry the world on your back? (2010, catalogue book), Barks (2011) and Peuples exposés, peuples figurants (2012).

Clément Chéroux is a photography historian and doctor in art history. He has published L?Expérience photographique d?August Strindberg (1994), Fautographie. Petite histoire de l?erreur photographique (2003) and Fotografie und Geschichte (2004). He is deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine Études photographiques and professor in the art history degree program at the Université de Lausanne.

Javier Arnaldo She holds a professorship in Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her publications include the following books: Style and nature (1990) The historical avant-gardes (1993) Yves Klein (2000) and 1914! The Vanguard and the Great War (2008). He has recently edited for el Círculo de Bellas Artes the books Goethe: Nature, art, truth (2012) and, in collaboration with Eva Fernández del Campo, Art in its global exile (2012).