Abstract

Thinking of absence as the object of a photographic image not only invites us to shift our perspective of interpretation but also poses a technological challenge. This article seeks to explore the phenomenon of the journey of absence through pixels, establishing a dialogue between the technical concepts of digital photographic production and philosophical reflections of absence, in order to talk about its behavior in the image with identifiable and concrete instances. As a result, it provides us with a tool that contributes to breaking the paradigm that poses an equivalence between physical presences and historical evidence in the context of visual narratives. By undertaking an archaeological reading of four photographs—by four different photographers as well as different contexts of conflict—we seek technical analogies to understand how the absence present in the photographed scene inoculates the pixels of the final image. To this end, we propose to extend the notion of the pixel to the journey that unfolds between the capture and the representation of a scene. In this perspective, the pixel is not only an element in the digital storage strategy but also a participant in the whole image process.