How can photography, whose visual representations are determined by the impression of a “here-and-now”, capture a meaning beyond that which is given to the lens? That is the central question Maria Giulia Dondero tries to answer in her book. She is a senior researcher for the FRS-FNRS, and she works in the Semiology and Rhetoric service for Professor Jean-Marie Klinkenberg. This young Italian semiologist’s research on photographic techniques and transcendence are contained in Le sacré dans l'image photographique. Etudes sémiotiques (Paris, Hermès Lavoisier, 2009).

There are received ideas that are difficult to deconstruct. For example: photos are only “fragments of reality”, an excrescence of what any ordinary person might see, nothing more. Maria Giulia Dondero shows, to the contrary, that through semiotic analysis of photographs by the most celebrated photographers of the present day, we can distance ourselves from their mere “specular” function and construct meanings, revealing things that are not captured by the lens. To the extent that the sacred cannot be reduced to the religious but belongs rather to an “ecological” conception (in the sense of a grouping composed by parties who have a healthy relationship), we see that the invention of Niepce and Daguerre is capable of constructing a second discourse on the world and on human values.

Painting, as we know, has not flinched from the task of representing the invisible. One has but to think of all the paintings – and they are legion in the Western Christian tradition – that have religious themes. But does contemporary photography, which accomplished the dissociation of the religious and the sacred, have plastic resources that can accomplish the same task? This is the problematic that the author explores with an impressive investigative finesse, using the body of work of six photographers.

Each of these oeuvres constitutes a “text”; this word does not designate the product of a verbal enunciation in this case but a visual one. Semantic precision is indispensable before entering into the analysis – called “textual analysis” – of the images. Several criteria of pertinence govern the choice with regard to the photographic discourse on the sacred. In one of these the title and theme of photographic images refer explicitly to subjects, personages, and motifs of religious iconography (life of Jesus, the life of the saints, visions of the beyond, etc.) with an occasional mention of sacred persons; this is the case with Madeleine en extase (1991) and Madeleine pénitente (1991) by Richon: in these photos, in fact, the saint Mary Magdalene does not appear. In another example, we are dealing with an explicit citation of a precise configuration in religious painting, at the figurative and plastic levels: representatives of this case include Le Christ mort (1490) by Mantegna and Soliloquy VII (2000) by Taylor-Wood. The latter image, it may easily be remarked, uses the spatial configuration of ancient altarpieces.