JOAN FONTCUBERTA
Photograph

‘Photography was born in the nineteenth century under certain historical, ideological, political and cultural parameters. Many of the values that we still preserve stem precisely from that time, precisely from that time germinating from photography. This is why I think that photography is a philosophy more than an artistic system that has to do with forms or aesthetics’ – Joan Fontcuberta 

Image
Joan Fontcuberta.

 

Artist, essayist, critic and photographer Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) offers a critical vision of reality and of photographic, historical or fictitious truths through photography and his context.

His work can be found in the most important museums and art galleries in the world, such as MoMA and the Met in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, CAAC in Seville, IVAM in Valencia, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Parco Gallery in Tokyo, MNAC and MACBA in Barcelona, the Redpath Museum in Montreal and Musée de l'Elisée in Lausanne, among others. In 2013 he received the prestigious Hasselblad International Photography Award.

Photographs are not mere props offered passively for our observation; they are symbolic mediations between us and reality and contribute to giving form, meaning and existence to the world around us. Almost without realising it, we have become addicted to images and suffer from image bulimia. Today we all produce and consume photos. We belong to the order of homo photographicus, a species on the evolutionary ladder that has led to the advent of a post-photographic culture. 

The project that serves as the backbone of the partnership between Fontcuberta and the Gran Teatre del Liceu shows the transformation process of the same photographs through different pathologies. Photographs are organisms like an organic metabolism and have their own life cycle: they are born, grow, reproduce and die. Their deterioration begins through a chemical process when conditions are not optimal. Fontcuberta rescues these ailing photographs which have suffered from some kind of trauma when they have almost disappeared and lost the information they contained.

The result of this image vengeance / amnesia is both poetic and nostalgic. They are photographs that have lost their materiality but nonetheless, though mutant, project powerful new images in a creative act of photographic recycling. It is a proposal that engages the natural and the supernatural in dialogue.

Joan Fontcuberta's work seduces, provokes and intrigues, but at the same time irony is a strategic part of it: an amenable façade for a very profound critique.