I have admired Joan Fontcuberta's work since I discovered his Sputnik project and, since then, the rest of his production, which always revolves around the idea that "all photography is a fiction that is presented as true". When we finish the portrait session he gives me a copy of Prosopagnosia, his latest book, which he has developed with Pilar Rosado, and explains to me, enthusiastic, what the project has consisted of: starting from an archive of photographs from a newspaper of the 30s, and through an artificial intelligence algorithm, they generated a collection of 853 human faces of people who have never existed. But what has most interested the authors are the errors that have occurred throughout the process. The faces that the system was creating, while learning to build them, from the pure noise of the pixels to the final forms, have given surprising results that recall the different artistic currents. It is what Fontcuberta calls "the very memory of art", from expressionism to minimalism, from surrealism to Bacon.
—
Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) has developed a plural activity in the world of photography as a creator, teacher, essayist, exhibition curator and historian.
Author of a dozen history books and essays on photography such as El beso de Judas. Photography and Truth (1997), Ciencia y Fricción (1998), La cámara de Pandora (2010), La furia de las imágenes (2016) or Revelaciones (2019). Some thirty monographs have been published on his creative work.
His work has been exhibited in museums around the world such as MoMA in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, IVAM in València, FOAM in Amsterdam, MEP in Paris, Science Museum in London and has been acquired by numerous public collections.
Among others, in 2013 he received the Hasselblad International Award and in 2022 he has been distinguished with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Université Paris VIII.