What does it mean to “inherit the world” through an image? The exhibition at MUDEC attempts to answer with a gesture that is as simple as it is ambitious: selecting one hundred photographs to recount two centuries of visual and human history. Here, photography emerges as a complex language, suspended between document and invention. From early nineteenth-century images - when portraiture was a rare and precious event - we move swiftly into a modern era in which the lens becomes a tool of interpretation. The experiments of artists such as Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson show how photography can construct reality, not merely record it. The journey then opens onto collective history: images that have shaped the twentieth century, from Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother to the Moon landing, up to more recent events. Yet alongside the external world, an inner one also emerges: identities, desires, and personal memories take form through the body and through staged imagery. In today’s world, where images proliferate without pause, photography once again questions its own role. No longer just a form of testimony, it becomes a means of navigating the present and imagining the future. More than a history of photography, this exhibition is an invitation to slow down our gaze and to recognize, in every image, a trace of our shared inheritance.
