Abstract

The paper looks at the whole history of the photographic device starting from the very birth of photography as a technique of reproduction and ending with the digital breakthrough. The aim is to understand, on the one hand, the history of photography as an alternation of rapid progress and slow assimilation and, on the other, to grasp the link between the social impact of technology and theoretical reflection, seeking a key to describe the phenomenon as a whole. The extensive overview of past and current debates will show how one of the main impact of digital revolution affects primarily our way of understanding photography and brings us to consider it not anymore as a pure signic event, but as a crossroads for social and cultural practices that make photography significant by assigning it different tasks from time to time.