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
