A propósito das fotografias premiadas pela organização World Press Photo, relativamente ao ano de 2006, anoto umas quantas palavras de Susan Sontag que ajudarão a reflectir sobre o papel da imagem…

«Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects - unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies…»

«Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it - a key procedure of a modern society. In the form of photographic images, things and events are put to new uses, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the usefull and the useless, good taste and bad.»

Susan Sontag, On Photography [pp. 69 e 174]