I remember I read in one of those researches about the Nahuas, written by Miguel LeonPortilla, that some prehispanic sculptures held a scepter-like drilled mirror,which served as a peeking hole where the deities would see the human issues.This text not only created in my mind the image of a being looking through a kind of frame, but also the idea of a frame in which the watching subject is reflected, thus proposing a perception of the otherness where the observer isincluded in the visual field. These old men understood the concept of light ina similar way to other civilizations; they talked about the light in some poems allusive to knowledge and wisdom, as some of the old civilizations of the Mediterranean and Asia –just to cite some of greater historical influence -also mentioned in some of their writings. First of all we refer to the light as the element that allows us to see-know with clarity, and from this idea another philosophical, scientific and artistic issues come off. In history, the concept of light is of the utmost importance. So, any civilization that we may start from, we will find that we have thought about light, we have studied about light, we have been inspired on light, we have controlled and processed light. Having developed technologies hat enable us to transmit it, we have globalized because of light; light that can’t letman rest because he wants to understand the universe. I think that the light speech exists per se, without any other intervention. Its speech tends to show as a goal the generation of a total perception of reality,and as a principle, just as a principle, through the optic nerve. In his happenings, the man has been concerned in settling down paradigms of reality and this has only been possible through representation. The communication of reality (general or particular) is always the representationof a perception with some criteria and therefore, particular. I think that this particular representation of reality is one of the constants of the artistic manifestations throughout history. The cave paintings of Altamira are, from mypoint of view, an expression of a group of individuals aware of their environment, their group, and therefore, of themselves. It is so that in agiven moment they focused their attention in the creation of a kind of handiwork expression “hunting the buffalo”, this with the goal of satisfying their restlessness generated by the knowledge of their reality. So, the subsequent visuals manifestations were worried to represent theparticular realities in the best conceivable way. With the appearance of the photographic technique, we learned how to reproduce apiece of visible reality and transmit it to a public spectator. With the outcoming of the image, audio, and data electronic transmission systems, we have gotten used to receive a very tendentious summary of the fragmented reality, in morning, evening and nightly shows. Besides there are other visual andaudiovisual documents that forge our perception of a remote, far away reality, which happens in other places and becomes part of our local reality since the appearing of the growing globalization. Photography and all of its derivations are one technique more in the history of the representation of reality. They are like the old drilled mirror where the photographer, is part of the photographed circumstance (althoughnot always in frame) and, therefore, produces a result with a frankly subjective vision. The great resemblance of the photographic image with the visible realityis what seduces us to trust that the document is its copy. A great part of thephotographic speech rooted its founding in this resemblance. Nowadays, we believe that technology, applied to researches, can give us a very approximate idea of what reality is, it is even capable of imagining past andfuture states of the researched subject. But the result is based solely uponspeculation; by this I mean that technology is able to recreate almost anyevent in the virtual world and by means of crossing references recreate also the interactive surrounding circumstances. Reality is so wide and full ofreferences that it is necessary to delimitate the elements and concepts to refer to.
