Pablo Picasso always maintained a complex and intense relationship with photography and with the photographers in his milieu, something that could be seen when he pretended to be a reporter one summer, when he used his image as an icon, or when he took inspired and playful self-portraits. This book, which is also the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at the Museu Picasso of Barcelona, immerses the reader in the universe of Picasso through photography and brings together images that explore all the facets of a creator who is simultaneously the author, model, witness and viewer of his work and life.

Classic genres of the fine arts are characterized by not requiring any sounds or voice. However, this nonverbal quality allows works of art to become a challenge for art history, which is bound to language and writing. The expression "silent poetry" used for painting or architecture is an eloquent indicator for the communicative effect of forms of expression, which are measured by language, but whose silent gestures nevertheless have to be judged using their own categories. The topos of the underlying non-describability of art refers to aspects like aura and atmosphere, opening the wide field of pictorial rhetoric, and leading up to the museum practices used to hang paintings.