Joanfontcuberta

In 1996 Joan Fontcuberta was chosen as the first artistic director of the prestigious Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, succeeding founder Lucien Clergue’s twenty-seven year reign. He chose as his theme Réels, Fictives, Virtuel—realities, fictions, and virtual—issues that have always been at the heart of his approach to photography.
Fontcuberta grew up in Barcelona in the nineteen-fifties and sixties in a family where nearly everyone worked in the advertising industry in one capacity or another. He became aware at an early age that “photography is a factory of illusions, the development of an image, strategies for persuasion, the emergence of mediating screens, the differences between things and their shadows.” It was the era of General Franco when the regime maintained a great deal of control over systems of information through state-controlled media. He writes, “My sensibility has developed as a function of the difficulties to get information, of the suspicion always present about the information we were given, and the consciousness of the fact that much of the information had been manipulated, filtered, censored.” This autobiographical experience and his studies of semiotics—the study of the science of signs—at university has informed his entire artistic career.
With the advent of the Internet, Photoshop, and other digital technologies not only is it easier to create “evidence” of things that do not exist, but the ways this information is inscribed into the way we think about and experience information has become ever more central to Fontcuberta’s latest works. As has often been said, we live in an information age and are awash in a sea of data including images. These data, words or images, are still, for the computer, pure data: “zeros and ones.” They are the ultimate free-floating signifier beloved of the semioticians. Nonetheless, it is almost impossible to imagine a life without computers, the Internet, and more specifically Wikipedia and Google, the Internet “search engines” we use to locate information and to make sense of it. With apologies to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the computer is a blunt instrument. Its algorithms can only handle certain sets of parameters that are programmed into them. By extension, if no data on a particular thing is entered into a computer, then, as far as the computer is concerned, it does not exist.
As always, Fontcuberta approaches this challenge from the standpoint of a systemic critique using art as his medium. In Googlegrams (2005—) Fontcuberta looks at the interplay between photography and information systems. The images are produced by a photo-mosaic program that is available as “freeware” on the Internet. Given the input of a digital-image file into a computer and various search criteria, Google’s Image Search function will find approximately 6,000 to 10,000 images from Internet databanks and assemble them into a facsimile of the original image and so create a Googlegram. These images are assembled according to various color and density values that replicate the pixels of the “original” scanned image. As a result, these computer-generated images are autonomous. They do, however, form a critique of data-ordering systems, and, a priori, of the way we organize society and are organized by those systems.
Finally, a Googlegram that seems to sum up all of Joan Fontcuberta’s oeuvre to date is Origen (Origin, 2006), an image of a Merovingian skull that is created from the following criteria: “origin,” ”evolution,” “design,” “form,” “function,” “art,” “architecture,” and “creativity.” That, as Fontcuberta notes, the skull was aesthetically modified while its owner was still alive redoubles the remarkable nature of artistic interventions then and now. Fontcuberta writes, “the idea I pursue is that of seeing my work as a screen upon which each person projects their own individuality. I like creating a dialogue: this for me is the real goal an artist should aspire to. . . . I think there has to be a possibility for dialogue and feed-back with the spectator, with any kind of spectator, because you have to keep in mind that dialogue can occur on different levels with different vocabularies.” Everything Fontcuberta has done in the past forty years throughout all his artistic twists and changes is in Origen. The photographs he makes, the Googlegrams included, “are only a means of illustrating and making explicit those ideas.” ”Evolution,” “design,” “form,” “function,” “art,” “architecture,” and “creativity,” these are all only ordering systems to be taken apart, investigated, and reincorporated into something beautiful and enigmatic that at the same time challenges us to question what it is we are looking at. That empty skull of Origen teaches us to take nothing at face value without questioning the concepts behind it, and that is Fontcuberta’s point.