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Abstract
Visual storytelling plays a fundamental role in contemporary art and culture. Staged photography, with its fictional and theatrical nature, turns into an accurate metaphor of photography as "mirror of reality", since it can reflect contemporary concerns beyond the appearance of things. In the context of hypermodernity, there are some recurring themes in photographic storytelling which explore various facets of the relationship between individuals and their social environment. Through the use of staged photography, artists like Gregory Crewdson, Sarah Hobbs, Mitra Tabrizian, Jeff Wall, Tom Hunter, Taryn Simon are shaping narratives and representations of reality beyond what is noticeable in our everyday experience, offering new perspectives that foster critical analysis and ethical implication.
Keywords: Staged photography, Storytelling, Contemporary Art, Hypermodernity, Representation
1.Staged Photography in Contemporary Art
Although classical photography, the so-called "documentary", was based on the idea that the photographer did not collaborate with the subject of the image or interfere with what appeared in front of the camera, today we can affirm that photography has substantially changed, including many other possibilities.
At the end of the 20th century, in the context of postmodernity, photography is redefined as a new artistic genre, exploiting the documentary, plausible appearance allowed by the direct registration of a reality that has been, however, connotatively arranged. Nowadays photography is constituted as an intense territory of experimentation and projection, in search of a conscious and necessary adaptation to what we could call the "symptoms of the present". Within this context, a type of photography stands out, which enables a conscious simulation while retaining traces of the "reality effect" while becoming a preferential vehicle in contemporary aesthetic experience.
The work of artists featured in this study - for instance Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson or Mitra Tabrizian - belong to a context of discussion of the photographic theories and developments of the late 20th century. Critics and theorists such as Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, David Campany or Philip Dubois were interested in these new practices that presented intricate layers of associations and relationships between author, subject, history, memory and spectator. Photography, in its expanded field, has become a prominent medium in the art world (Edwards 2002).
The large scale of these photographic works becomes significant, in terms of engaging the...