Sara Benaglia
moderated by Stefano Riba
in collaboration with Foto Forum Bozen‍ ‍

The book Immagini infestate. Ecologie tossiche della fotografia reflects on photography as anything but a neutral medium: since its origins, it has been intertwined with dynamics of power, exploitation and control. Photography is not only a tool for representing the world, but also a technology that consumes, classifies and transforms reality—through material processes involving resources, labour and extraction, as in the case of silver and its mining origins. Through a journey that moves from analogue photography to digital and artificially generated images, the book examines how the role of images has changed over time—leading to today’s condition of visual overproduction and loss of meaning. The narrative begins with a concrete and unexpected element: the presence of organic material that has formed on old photographs. These alterations become the starting point for a reflection on the materiality of images, on what endures through time, and on how it may still be possible to resist the consumerist logic that governs them. In this sense, the book proposes understanding photography not merely as an image, but as a physical and fragile object—made of matter, chemistry and residues—capable of preserving traces, memory and resistance.