Joan Fontcuberta: The Photography of Nature / The Nature of Photography

“Joan Fontcuberta is one of the most highly acclaimed international wildlife photographer” it says somewhere in The Photography of Nature & The Nature of Photography, so it’s got to be true. Just like the story about the fossils of mermaids at the end of which this sentence leads off the author’s bio. You might now be tempted to inject that mermaids don’t exist and never did. But Fontcuberta has pictures, and the article, convincingly written, makes a strong case in point. There are quite a few other things you didn’t know about in the book. There’s a early-evolution centaur, where you have a monkey instead of a human torso attached to a horse (any biologists reading this will please forgive my somewhat sloppy description). Or there’s Soviet cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov, lost in space (along with his companion, a dog named Kloka).

Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta is the 33rd recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad
Foundation International Award in Photography.

To celebrate the award MACK and The Hasselblad Foundation are publishing a collection of
six of Fontcuberta’s most iconic series including: Herbarium (1984) and Fauna (1987), dealing
with botanical and biological findings of newly discovered species; Constellations (1993),
images of previously undiscovered stars and their stardust; Sputnik (1997), which tells the tale
of a Russian cosmonaut still lost in space; also included are Sirens (2000), an investigative
project for National Geologic on the finding of the Hydropithecus (mermaid) fossils, and
Orogenesis (2002) in which Fontcuberta explores landscapes using Terragen technologies.

Fontcuberta’s photography is itself about photography’s own workings, and with each series
he challenges the audience’s trust in the veracity of the medium and its function as a system
of representation. Confronting our anxieties about that system, Fontcuberta’s careful
fabrications are laced with clues and inconsistencies – the photographer himself even
appears, disguised as Hans von Kubert or Joan Fontana. In exposing the various artifices of
the photographic medium, he asks how and why photography acquires a seductive
truthfulness in the eyes of its viewers. As Jorge Wagensberg suggests, ‘The mere possibility
that it could be a Fontcuberta is an invitation to think; in other words, it makes the believer
sceptical and the incredulous believe’.

© Joan Fontcuberta

The book is a survey of Fontcuberta’s oeuvre displaying his genius as photographer, essayist,
humorist and fantasist alike. In teasing fashion, the book can be flipped to reveal an essay
section, with texts by Geoffrey Batchen and Jorg Wagensberg that examine and unpick the
myths that Fontcuberta has so meticulously constructed.

• The Photography of Nature / The Nature of Photography by Joan Fontcuberta
• Embossed printed hardcover
• 21 cm x 26 cm
• 224 pages
• Price €50.00 £45.00 $55.00
• ISBN: 978-1-907946-51-6
• Publication date: 25th October 2013

Photography

Related Posts

Jeroen Toirkens: Solitude

Netherlands – In April 2013 Jeroen Toirkens and Petra Sjouwerman travelled by car, boat, bus and snowmobile across the Barents ...

John Vink: ‘The photographer is not a hero’

Cambodia- Based out of Cambodia for the past 13 years, Belgium born photojournalist John Vink, member of the prestigious Magnum ...

Football’s Lost Boys – Jason Andrew

Turkey – One evening in the basement of an Internet café in the Sisli neighbourhood of Istanbul, a small group ...

Tiane Doan na Champassak: Kolkata

India –  August, 1943. Night is falling on Calcutta, silencing its flocks of ravens, but wakening another kind of life ...

Scoffing Pig : Nozomi Iijima

Japan –  I grew up as a farmer’s daughter. My home was sandwiched between a pigpen and a farmhouse and ...

Colin Pantall on Ken Grant “No Pain Whatsoever”

England –   ‘It began as a way of remembering the craftspeople and laborers of my adolescence,’ writes Ken Grant ...

The Whales Eyelash AMC

The Whale’s Eyelash: A Play in Five Acts

United Kingdom –  The great technological leap forward that took place in the 19th century in optical lens systems such ...

Simon Baker : ‘Europe’s No Longer The Home Of Photography’

England – Simon Baker of Tate Modern London is the institute’s first curator of photography and international art and is ...

Yaakov Israel: “The Quest for the Man on The White Donkey” – Powerful Photos of Israel/Palestine

Israel – As per the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the Messiah (the Prophet) will arrive riding on a white donkey. A ...