Joan Fontcuberta co-opts all forms of media and public communication. In essence, he creates modern-day Trojan-horse-type bodies of work and presents them, deadpan, in scholarly journals, hard-bound “scientific” books, large-scale legitimate museum exhibitions, and as newsworthy “discoveries” that fool even the most professional of experts, journalists, and their readers.
He produced a number of series:
- Miracles & Co. (documenting the miraculous powers of a
secluded religious sect); - Orogenesis (which “tricks” military satellite terrain-imaging software to create images derived from paintings and photographs rather than satellite imagery);
- Herbarium and Fauna (botanical and biological findings of previously undiscovered bizarre plants and animals);
Sputnik (mythical story of a Russian cosmonaut who is still lost in space), - Pin Zhuang (when a US spy plane crashed in China, the Chinese re-assembled the pieces into a variety of working spacecraft);
Hemograms (exploring identity through blood and its self-expression as abstract art); - A series of photomosaics using photo-imaging freeware and Google’s image search engine to re-create popular media images (as usual, the supporting text often contains the “real” message).
He is the author/creator of more than 20 books, including The Artist and the Photograph, which “proves” that Picasso, Dali, Miro and other famous painters actually used photographs as the original source material for some of their greatest masterpieces. That work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true. (Serious museums joined in the joke and presented the “original” photos side by side with the actual paintings, and even experts in their fields got duped — and then angry). His latest book, “Landscapes without Memory”, is published by Aperture.