ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at exploring a new field in aesthetics: improvisation in photography. Photography seems to have a close relationship with improvisation in the performing arts. From the semiotic point of view, both an improvised performance and a photograph are deictics. The ontological link between the photo and the contingent situation of production has artistic relevance because a consistent part of the image’s artistic merit depends on how the photographer interacts with, and responds to, the situation. The Slovenian photographer Evgen Bavcar cannot be surprised by his photos. In fact, because he is blind, he cannot see them. The results of his shots are not only unforeseeable, but unseen and unseeable for him. Improvisation can be understood as the coincidence between invention and realization: the creative and responsive interaction with the concrete situation in which artists, as human beings, are involved, as well as the enactment of an artistic “grammar of contingency”.
