(Barcelona, 1955)
Photographer, theorist of the photographic image, exhibition curator and photographic editor, he was founder of the magazine Photo Vision (1980). In his theoretical and photographic works he reflects on the truth that is assumed in the photographic image. His artistic production explores the capacity of representation and impersonation. At the same time, he questions the public use of the image and the intoxication of information. In his works he makes visual games and parodies to incite the viewer's imagination and warn him about credulity and the fallacious mechanisms that operate in the public transmission of information and knowledge. Among his theoretical texts, the following stand out: Photographic Aesthetics (Gustavo Gili, 1982), The Kiss of Judas. Photography and truth (Gustavo Gili, 1997). Fontcuberta has exhibited regularly in the most prestigious art centers, such as the Folkwang Museum in Essen (1987), the MoMA in New York (1989), the IVAM in Valencia (1992), the Musée Redpath in Montreal in Canada (1999), The Dalí Museum in Saint Petersburg in Florida (2003), the Fundació Miró in Palma de Mallorca (2007), the Australian Center of Photography in Sydney (2007), the Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam (2010) and the Fotografins Hus in Stockholm (2013) . Among the many awards received, the prestigious Hasselblad International Photography Award in 2013 stands out. His work is found in prominent collections such as the MoMA in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum Reina Sofía Art Center in Madrid, the Center Pompidou in Paris, the FNAC in Paris and the MACBA in Barcelona, among others.
He has participated in Medialab Madird with the Googlegramas project, a reflection on synthesis images, the information society and the kaleodoscopic entity of Google. It is a visual configuration of the semantic field displayed by words on the Internet. Foncuberta composes an image from many others, the result of an Internet search through a series of associated terms and what it calls “source images” that the search words suggest. The procedure only takes to its ultimate consequences the fact that every digital image is a mosaic.
