Press photography. From simulation to post-truth in the digital era

Contemporary photography is a cultural product in a transformation process. This paper aims to reflect how photography and society have move on together in relation to the idea of reality. The aim is to understand how photography, in the last decades of the 20th century, is living a vertiginous process of overcoming conceptual orientations: the transmutation of reality and the construction of a symbolic scheme. With the incorporation of new digital media, an iconic turn will cause an overestimation of the image over the reality. This statement is based on the fact that the image has become nowadays a product of consumer society, a globalised, directed and increasingly attractive product. It is a product that supplants reality to create possible simulations. The obtained result will offer new ways of photography conception and visual communication that do not pursue the simulation, but the presence itself. The digital image, characterized by overproduction, has a multimodal approach. No need to replace anything: it's just a show.