With Orogenesis, Fontcuberta experiments with cartographic so+ware, using it to both manipulate images and control them. “For this series I use topographic so+ware that converts cartographic data into images. But I tricked the software because I didn’t put in a map. Instead I put in one of the masterpieces of art – a Gainsborough, a Cézanne or a Van Gogh – and the computer used this to make a translation. By doing this, I’m questioning the nature of a picture; is it defined by the tools that make it – in the case of photography, by the lens and the camera – or is it a series of semiotic messages? It’s a way to interrogate the ontological nature of photography in this technological era when we have digital tools at our disposal.
“It’s saying that to understand images we don’t need to understand nature. Instead, images are the system we use to access reality.” With this in mind, we see the smoothed-out contours of Fontcuberta’s experiments, and because there is a default mode, Gainsborough and Van Gogh end up looking like everything else. ‘is experiment might be a commentary on topographic software, but it is one that can be extended to the generic defaults adopted by all photographers, both in terms of the lenses, cameras and lights they use and the post-production techniques employed; whether those techniques are digital or analogue does not really matter.
“I was influenced by Marshall McLuhan when he said ‘the medium is the messageʼ. The main purpose of photography in the 1960s and ʼ70s was to provide a regime of truth. Photography is made by a machine so the will to create an image, the responsibility for the images, is transferred to the camera. It’s something outside the body so we trust it because it provides this idea of authenticity.
“Now there is such a mass of images circulating they don’t just represent the world, they become a part of it,” says Fontcuberta. “We all take pictures now. We are all ‘homo photographicusʼ, but this change hasn’t improved our ability to read images. We may not believe images in our conscious mind, but in our unconscious minds we do. In both our individual unconscious and the collective unconscious.” This influences how narratives are presented to people and how we read them, he continues, so it is precisely these accepted myths that he seeks to undermine. “I’m interested in fakes and fiction. I think there are three levels of fiction – criticism, parody and pastiche. I use fiction to create a critical discourse of how information is transmitted and filtered through academic and cultural institutions.
“Miracles & Co is a fiction within a fiction. I present myself as a journalist, something that is not true, and I go to an orthodox monastery in Karelia in Finland, where a sect of monks has taken over the monastery and are teaching miracles.” Fontcuberta visits the fictional monastery (which counts Rasputin and L Ron Hubbard as former guests) in his journalist persona and learns how to perform miracles that range from old classics such as levitation to new age variations that include growing breasts and surfing on dolphins.
“It’s a way to criticise faith, religion and superstition, and the way in which they involve politics and economic agendas. It’s a parody, but it’s done with an exaggerated language – the language of the graphic novel.”
Miracles & Co is an example of Fontcuberta’s interest in how our readings of photography are changing and how he can change these readings. “The easy answer is education,” he says. “When I presented Fauna at the Museum of Natural Science in Barcelona, I saw a family looking at the pictures of these fantasy animals. The father said, ‘It’s so great that we came here. I had no idea these animals existed. They’re amazing.ʼ The son looked at him and said, ‘But they’re not real, Dad. They’re fake!ʼ The father got angry, slapped him on the back of the head and told him that because they are in a museum they must be real. It was interesting to me that the child wasn’t educated in the truth of the museum; he wasn’t perverted by culture. This is a very important political concern.”
Fontcuberta continues to cast doubt on what we see with projects such as Sirens, in which he creates fossilised skeletons of mermaids to show an evolutionary link between man and fish. “In Sirens I’m interested in hoaxes. It’s like the Piltdown Man, where bones were used to manipulate information and infiltrate the world. The skeletons remain in nature [embedded in earth as if they were real fossils], so Sirens is a kind of open-air exhibition. You can see them in France. Go to Provence, for example, and see them in real life. It’s also a film and a book; it’s a multi-layered project.
“I started Sirens in 2000, but I am still working on it. Picasso once said he never finishes a work, he just abandons it. I work in the same way. As an artist, I’m always creating works of fiction and fakes to trap the viewer.
“I like to consider my work as a vaccine, where you inoculate the world with a weak virus so it will protect you against the big virus. My mission is to warn people about the possibility that photography might be doctored and show why people need to be sceptical of images that influence our behaviour and our way of thinking.”
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