What does it mean to think of a photograph materially? What are the political, economic, cultural, and historical relationships that operate within the material structure of these images?

The depth of surfaces brings together a collection of research from various disciplines that investigates photographs from their physicality. This approach allows for an understanding of photographs, studying them and engaging with them through their composition and material structure. From proposals that examine the complex connections between photography and scientific and philosophical debates about matter, to decolonizing practices involving photographic objects and their circulation, to works that explore the links between photographic materiality and ecology, the digital universe, artificial intelligence, and archives. 

This book invites us to delve into the question of the materiality of photographic artifacts as a way of being in the world and proposes new ways of (re)thinking our relationship with them in the present time.

Authors: Juliana Robles de la Pava and Clara Tomasini