Introduction to Ronald Kay’s “On photography Time split in two”

The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay’s work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile’s art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay’s written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia. The first chapter of Ronald Kay’s Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay’s theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological event.

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