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CENTER THAT IS A PHOTOGRAPHY SCHOOL
From its origins, registered in photochemical emulsions
made up of silver halogen grains, up to its more
recent form of fragmentation and capture, the pixel,
photography is establishing itself as the great
protagonist of the artistic, scientific and technological
contemporary knowledge. Here in Brazil, this artistic
and technical language and its relationship with
those that use or develop it, has created a paradox.
The more the photograph is created, developed, researched
and manipulated, more it is seen as a simple accessory
or instrument, not being classified as excellence
area yet, in the academic levels of our country.
In the Northern Hemisphere, in countries such as
Canada, the United States, France, Belgium, Germany,
Spain, England, among others, the photograph, in
a larger scale, is already included in greatly requested
curricula for graduation and post-graduation in
Photography, mainly with an emphasis in Arts and
Communication.
Besides,
it became the main lever in the artistic and
scientific progress of several areas, such as: Television,
Movies, Fine arts, Communication, Information and
Entertainment, Internet, Medicine (diagnosis by
image, angiographies, endographies, x-rays, etc.),
digital virtual atmospheres (Computer graphics,
Digital Art), Thermography, Holography, images of
no-visible spectra (Physics), Astrophotography,
Biophotografy, Geophotografy, among several other
ways of using it that are found in different research
levels and in the way it is taught in developed
countries. Here, more precisely in the Universidade
Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), since 1992,
through the Photography Center, the photograph is
seen, researched and applied in the production of
knowledge and qualification of human resources,
as an excellence area. For that it was implanted,
in 1993, a research program, based on the experimental
and applied photography denominated FOT.XPER,UFRGS,
where Photography is the protagonist, the Individual,
the method, and the production of Knowledge and
Purpose. Through this program, the Photography Center
grants the opportunity, organizes and guides individual
projects (authorial) of photographic research, based
on analogue photography, as well as on digital photography,
where graduation students, and postgraduates from
several areas of UFRGS as well as recently graduated
or doing college courses in other universities (as
guests) try to practice photography in all its inclusions,
starting from several stages of visual-space perception,
appropriate theoretical concepts towards the applications
of experimental methodologies, concomitantly to
the several types and forms of practical manipulations.
This
way the Center produces and applies the knowledge
that it gains from these researches to the development
of courses and workshops in academical extension
and qualifying the photography subject for the Communication
and Archivology courses, and, in the near future,
for the Biology, Geography and Librarianship courses
at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
(UFRGS), Brazil as well.
Mario
Bitt-Monteiro [ ]
Photography Consultant
Coordinator of the Photography Center of UFRGS
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