People that are in writing, documentary filmmaking, and painting always have had the possibility to edit and to correct. To clarify their ideas and focus their objectives is seen as a good thing, everyone’s concern is to know their point of view, to learn through them and to know through their eyes. A photographer is also entitled to do this, the resource is irrelevant, what matters are the ideas, the creativity, the information, the communication.
The expansion of time is directly proportional to the expansion of content, images acquire the character of a meta-language, but above all, they acquire a narrative character.
Nowadays photographers insist on telling stories, either in series or with single pictures.
Of course when the new possibilities of a new medium or language are wide open to a lot of people, a huge amount of garbage is produced, but we only care about the things that stand the test of time such as Pedro Meyer and Jeff Walls’ work.

In other sessions there has been or will be talk about the multiple supports for photography, such as audio, hypertext and video, but I’d like to focus on the fixed image resulting from this new and enormous concept of time stretching through the second shutter.
We definitely cannot talk about maturity of the medium; fortunately, we can think that the separations caused in a decade have reached a fair level concerning the phenomena, but chiefly in regard to the forcefulness of the digital as a tool, more than as an artistic process. Currently one of the amazing uses of the new technology is what we call hybrids, the encounter and crossover of technologies, it is the encounter to reach agreements and mutual use, it is to expand not time but the possibilities of old resources and previous conceptions to reach new audiences and meet new needs. When I spoke about photojournalism, I mentioned one of the better examples of this idea, such as photographing with state-of-the-art digital tools to show our work in traditional mediums such as printed newspapers, but there are many more examples shown in this colloquium, we have seen the Ken Merfeld exhibition who used the wet collodion technique with a digital output, but I shall refer to a work in which I participated. As a part of Fotoseptiembre.

There is an exhibition in the Arts and Crafts Factory in Iztapalapa, that shows a sample of the outcome of workshops I’ve taught in different parts of the country, where we explored the Holga camera’s possibilities, this is a crude equipment, almost a toy, yet it allows the participants to explore and mostly, to stretch the photographic language beyond its technical and formal limitations by using new technologies within out reach.
We are using the two ends of the thread, we photograph almost like they used to in the beginning of photography, but we retouch and print in the most avant-garde manner.

As result, photographers have broadened their perception of photographic language by placing it into a 180-degree scope. The natural conclusion is that everything goes that we can use all resources, which in the end the important thing are the ideas and the expression. On the other hand, the “Holga” phenomenon has found its best space in the internet, countless galleries are set daily on the web to show the work of these strange tribe that despite using a most rudimentary equipment for capturing their images, they disseminate them with state-of-the-art machines, even establishing discussion forums in the mean time, there are sites that upload images on a daily basis and photographers exchange experiences and tips. These cameras are sold and bought mostly through the Internet. We can say that this particular community does not stop to discuss about the appropriateness of the used media, they just use them freely, this is only one of many examples that I consider to be symptomatic of the present times, maybe I am a bit overoptimistic but I am not an utopist.