Abstract

This essay was originally written in English as the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Realities and Plausibilities: Re-enacting Realism in Contemporary Photographic Art (Galerie Xippas, Athens, 2009). Based on the presupposition that nowadays the real has become elastic, both in physical and conceptual terms, the exhibition examined the ideological premises of realism and its re-enactment in contemporary photographic art through recent and unpublished photographic work of eleven international artists of Hellenic descent. The essay contextualizes the curatorial choices examining the historical and conceptual premises of photographic realism and how the blurring of the boundaries between snatching, reconstructing or even simulating the real has acquired novel currency within the wider realm of the visual arts. The text claims that these practices introduce a new type of consciousness about photography as a mode of representation, liberating the photograph from the once singular relationship to its referent (the Barthesian “having-been-there” condition) and the presumption of the “moral righteousness” accrued to the “unmediated” real.