Contemporary Photography Discourses

This essay highlights the photographic experimentation of Carolina Lino and Luca Zangrandi, whose projects reflect the diversity of artistic approaches cultivated at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Lino, trained in Painting and holding a Postgraduate Diploma in Contemporary Photography Discourses, presents A escrita que nasce, where drawing and writing merge through natural metamorphic processes. Her work evokes Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” revealing a poetic vegetal script in which light inscribes thought and perception. Zangrandi, a Multimedia Art student, explores photo-chemical processes in Remains of a Portrait, producing chemigrams that analogise bodily metamorphosis with photographic transformation. Through the interplay of developer, fixer, and light, his images evoke portraits in continuous states of becoming. Both artists foreground photography’s experimental dimension, situated within the Faculty as a speculative laboratory bridging artistic disciplines and expanding the medium’s possibilities beyond digital certainty.