Mind Games

Fontcuberta, by contrast, questions our limited photographic imagination and the way that style affects our perceptions. For Blossfeldt, you could read August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Bechers, and Rineke Dijkstra. But by using that objective typological style, Fontcuberta is questioning exactly what it is about photographing straight, with a clear background, that appears to have a truth value. And the answer is nothing. Just because something is straight, and clear, doesn’t make it true.

“I’m also fascinated by the way Blossfeldt saw himself. He regarded himself as a sculptor and made his pictures to use as a pedagogic tool. Today his sculptures are completely forgotten and this is an important lesson. When we want to be artists and we become pretentious we fail, but when we have happy accidents we succeed. I’m interested in happy accidents. We should be ready to take advantage of them.”

Fontcuberta builds on the theme of natural curiosities in a later series. “Fauna is more sophisticated because it has a complete story, and photography played an authenticating role in these elaborate stories. Fauna includes vitriums, sound recordings and videotapes. It’s a way to criticise photography as an institution, but it also ‘uses the idea of ’ photography as an institution.”

In Fauna, Fontcuberta makes a fictional discovery of the archive of the mysterious (and also entirely fictional) naturalist Peter Ameisenhaufen. The archive contains notes, photographs and specimens of creatures such as Centaurus Neandertalensis, a species that combines the body of a baboon with the legs of a goat. Photographs act as a verifying tool for the work, which has been exhibited in installations, complete with taxidermy animals, specimens in jars, skeletons in display cabinets, sketches and dioramas.

Fontcuberta has fun with these, but it’s fun at the expense of every device used to convey authority on an image, idea or specimen. In Fauna, every presentational device is a photographic McGuffin, the idea being that in real museums, the pedestal, the frames and other means of presenting grand narratives are some kind of visual quotation marks – McGuffins designed to lead you into believing unconditionally in whatever narrative the institution is seeking to impose.

“I’m interested in the authority of museums in general. When they deal with science they impose filters on how we see the world. It’s an authoritarian way of imposing a particular kind of knowledge on people, and photography is used to add pressure to that knowledge.

“My work has a pedagogic sense. It’s a prophylactic approach that creates doubt in people’s minds. It questions people’s credibility in photographic culture.”

He questions the sacred cows of photographic history, the museum and the language of the presentation science, and you get the feeling he could happily target just about anything in which there is a status quo. He’s like a photographic Chris Morris, but where Morris used film and television to poke fun at the languages of politics, advertising and terrorism, Fontcuberta delights in having fun with images. There is nothing sober about his work, and this is apparent in every project he makes, regardless of the method.