Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta received in March this year the 2013 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. An exhibition celebrating Fontcuberta's work and featuring iconic images from his most famous series, opened yesterday in the Hasselblad Center at the Göteborg Museum of Art, Sweden.
In March the Hasselblad Foundation’s panel stated about the decision to award the prize to Joan Fontcuberta: "Joan Fontcuberta is one of the most inventive contemporary photographers, with an over 30-year achievement of constantly investigating and questioning the photographic medium. His work is distinguished by original and playful conceptual approaches that particularly explore photographic conventions, means of representation and claims to truth. He challenges concepts of science and fiction in interdisciplinary projects that extend far beyond the gallery space. In addition to his photographic practice, Joan Fontcuberta’s capacities as a writer, teacher and curator have been greatly inspirational to the younger generation."
Born in Barcelona in 1955, Joan Fontcuberta considers himself as a self-taught photographer influenced by the Situationists and the Dadaists. He first started working in advertising, co-founded the Spanish/English visual arts journal PhotoVision in 1980 and held numerous teaching appointments as professor of photography and audiovisual communication both in his home country and abroad as a visiting lecturer.
Fontcuberta usually approaches his subjects from a conceptual perspective that allows him to blur the edges between fact and fiction. In his images nothing is what it seems and the viewers end up believing in a constructed world that does not exist.
In his series "Herbarium" (1984) Fontcuberta classified numerous exotic plants that he actually recreated using everyday objects such as electrical cords and rubber hoses; "Fauna" (1987) is instead a fictional yet encyclopedic catalogue of the long-lost archives of German zoologist Dr. Peter Ameisenhaufen, and features bizarre creatures such as the Solenoglypha polipodida, a sort of snake with 12 feet.
In Fontcuberta's world, photography is a way to look at things from a different point of view and with a healthy dose of satire and humour: the stardust in his "Constellations" series (1993) is actually formed by the insects and debris on Fontcuberta's car windshield; in "Sputnik" (1997) the photographer chronicled the story of fictional Russian cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov and his dog Kloka, both vanished after getting out of the Soyuz 2 spacecraft for a routine space walk, mysteriously yet hilariously leaving behind only a vodka bottle containing a note.
In quite a few cases the media actually believed Fontcuberta's elaborate fictitious stories and in-jokes ("Ivan Istochnikov" is the Russian translation of Joan Fontcuberta and both the two surnames mean "hidden fountain"): when "Sputnik" was showcased as a proper exhibition that also included artifacts relating to Istochnikov's space mission, the Russian authorities stated the photographer had offended the glorious Russian past.
Even in our rather confusing times in which digital photography allows us to fabricate fake visual fantasies and immediately spread them all over the world through social media, Fontcuberta's hoaxes remain highly intriguing because they are actually the result of in-depth researches. The photographer seems to have a genuine talent for confounding fact and fiction that reminds of Jorge Luis Borges's writings in which the author combined actual data with a wildly fictitious world.
Fontcuberta continued his inventive explorations of photography with "Hemograms" (1998), in which he employed blood samples on pieces of transparent film as a negative; "Sirens" (2000), an installation of fake fossils of mermaids in the Réserve Géologique de Haute-Provence in Digne-les-Bains in southern France, that he proceeded to photograph; "Orogenesis" (2002), a series of digital landscapes made using Terragen, a computer program that turns maps into images of three-dimensional terrain, but that he employed to turn famous artworks and parts of the human body into fantastic landscapes; and "Deconstructing Osama" (2007) in which he reinvented the leader of Al Qaeda's military wing as an Arab television soap opera actor and singer.
The exhibition at the Hasselblad Center - accompanied by a collection of six of Fontcuberta’s most iconic series in book format published by MACK and The Hasselblad Foundation - is a journey through various cross-referenced pseudo-disciplines (including fictional botany, zoology, and cosmonautics) but it's above all an invitation to ponder about the dichotomies ruling in our lives: genuine and revealing truth Vs seductive and disruptive lies; real Vs imagined; documentary approach Vs intellectual construction, and our tendency to always manage to describe and discuss nonexistents facts in just the same way as existent truths (check out this hilarious video about fake fashion designers and people lying about seeing their catwalk shows or discussing their collections as if they had seen them...).
Using photography as a tool to prompt us to visually think, Fontcuberta insinuates doubts in our minds that destabilise our certainties, raise questions and contradictions, and ultimately leave us smiling at his sharp wit.
Joan Fontcuberta - The Photography of Nature / The Nature of Photography, Hasselblad Center at the Göteborg Museum of Art, Sweden, until 19th January 2014
Image credits for this post
1. Micostrium Vulgaris © Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera
2. Cala Rasca (from the series Herbarium) © Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera
3. Solenoglypha Polipodida © Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera
4. Ivan Istochnikov giving a speech in front of his ship © Joan Fontcuberta
5. Ivan Istochnikov and Kloka on their historical E.V.A (extra vehicular activity) © Joan Fontcuberta
6. A message in a vodka bottle roams the cosmos, 1997 © Joan Fontcuberta
7. MN 50: MONOCEROS (NGC 2323) AR 07 h. 03,2 min. / D -08º 20 ' © Joan Fontcuberta
8. Orogenesis: Derain, 2004 © Joan Fontcuberta
9. Orogenesis: Frith, 2004 © Joan Fontcuberta
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