La imagen expandida. Cuerpo, tiempo y espacio en la fotografía mexicana (1994-2014)

Abstract

[EN] Summary in English This doctoral thesis seeks to explain, describe, and understand the phenomenon of authorial Mexican photography from 1994 to 2014 through the concept of expanded image. I describe expanded image as a key to new discursive, conceptual, and supportive possibilities that articulate post-modern practices and as a strategy of visual arts production in which the traditional forms are modern. Photography in Mexico since the 1990's was primarily influenced by Performance and Installation Art, but lost its qualities related to documental photography and was far from being an iconic register of social reality. Since the 90's, photographers started to use other art disciplines to widen their limits and production fields, and by such means photography began to redefine itself as expanded image. The display fields of photography have changed radically and bit-by-bit this change becomes familiar. For the analysis of images I use the visual art critique methods of Professor Carlos Blas Galindo of the National Research, Documentation, and Information Center of Plastic Arts (CENIDIAP) of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA). The method consists of describing and analyzing three principal elements: 1. Esthetics: Expressive Force, 2. Thematics: Motive or principal matter, Thematic Treatment, the author's Posture towards the work, the author's Opinion towards the time period, Psychological implications and communicative Efficacy and 3. Artistics: Maturity of individual style, Originality, Technical repertoire and manner of application, Materials and procedures, Justification, Quality of production, Solutions of composition, chromatics, and Relationship of the work with the artistic context. Research consists of three thematic axes: Body, Time, and Space. In the first chapter Body/Performance in Mexican photography, I mainly approach the existing link between Performance Art and Photography as a metaphor of construction of meaning, thinly linked with feminist stances, and where, evidently, the discourse of gender is a characteristic. As in the chapter on space, I intend to analyze photography not only as a register, but also as the final support of a performative process. In the second chapter I approach the last thematic axis: Time/Memory, linked to the staging, nostalgia, footprint, and inquiry of archives as an appropriation of memory. In this chapter I analyze authors who link photography with practices such as Installation or object art. In the conclusions I can, with certainty, make an analysis of photographers from 1994 to 2014, and will be capable of linking Mexican photography with expanded image from a theoretical and historical reflection. In the third chapter of my thesis Space/Installation in Mexican photography, I approach the artistic practices linked to space as a significant part of the work, specifically with disciplinary crossings with the installation and the intervention of the landscape, in which photography is no longer used as a medium for obtaining a visual register of…