‘The work as work-in-progress research. In his famous First Lecture at the Collège de Francia in 1937, Paul Valéry proposed the term poïétique to designate the study, not of a finished work of art, but of its production and conditions of realisation. Contemporary art has crowned this perspective by speaking of work in progress. Artists have known this for a long time, through their own experience. In particular, photographers who work with photographic quality, in their temporal process of putting it into form. This is the general problematic that this book explores and that has been thought of in the 6th International RETINA.Argentina Week, in December 2019. This time, from a specific perspective, that of the research process, like that of a detective, in the manner of the writer Patrick Modiano, ‘in search of an evocative detail allowing us to reconstitute a whole, although there was no such whole, but only fragments, stardust’ (Patrick Modiano, L'horizon, 2010). Thus, the works, the production of contemporary artists and photographers in particular, the current and universal art - let us also consider prehistory, Leonardo Da Vinci and Duchamp - appear under a new, multiple, enriched face, thanks to research, to a work that progresses infinitely and never ends: the receiver can continue the research and the work indefinitely.