This course will deal with photography as a manifold phenomenon: in fact, we all use photographs as an irreplaceable tool for keeping track of events, sharing experiences, documenting facts, etc. And yet photography is also – at the very same time – a creative language, an art form, a media implied in nearly every professional practice, from insurance to architecture, from advertising to philosophy.
But how do we make sense of photographs, then? And how do we read photography; or do we?
Instinctively we manage quite well to keep afloat in the ocean of images that flood our contemporary world but, once we turn to use that same language, do we manage equally well? Commonly, not only we are poorly schooled in the use of photography, but we are predictable and shallow also in its reading. This course will start from the very basics in a steady move towards the surface of contemporary photographic culture; to do so we shall use practice no less than theory. The purpose of this course will be to make an active experience of the nature of photographic images and their paradoxical life. By learning how they live and behave we will understand how to trap them in a sensible net of questions.

Cinema and video are but a variety of photographic images, and yet such languages – although sharing big chunks of their basic grammars – differ in most of their syntaxes. Therefore we shall also explore the grey areas where photographic sequencing overlaps with the logic of cinematic montage, to map photographic language to its whole extent.
Once we own the right set of questions to pose to the photographic images – and ourselves concerning our agency as users and interpreters – we will reach a deeper understanding that will enhance our self-awareness and fluidity also in their making.