Why do we believe images? Few artists have pursued this question as rigorously as the Catalan photographer, theorist and conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta. His work is a central point of reference for my project Face & Fiction – AI, Identity and Illusion.
Background
Joan Fontcuberta (born 1955 in Barcelona) is one of the most important photographers and image theorists working today. Since the 1980s he has examined how photographic truth is constructed – and why we are so ready to accept it.
Key ideas
For Fontcuberta, a photograph is never objective proof. Its meaning comes from context: from institutions, archives, media and captions. An image seems credible because it appears in a credible setting.
With the term post-photography he describes a world in which billions of digital images document less than they communicate and compete for attention. In 2011 he set out these ideas in a manifesto in the newspaper La Vanguardia, and in the same year co-curated the exhibition From Here On at the photography festival in Arles.
Major works
- Herbarium (1984) – plants assembled from rubbish and industrial parts, photographed in the style of classic botanical plates.
- Fauna (1987, with Pere Formiguera) – invented animal species, presented as a serious natural-history exhibition with photographs, sketches and field notes.
- Sputnik (1997) – the fictional story of the Soviet cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov, supposedly erased from official history.
- Googlegramas (from 2005) – photomosaics built from Google image search results; an early play with algorithms as image makers.
The face of the cosmonaut Istochnikov is Fontcuberta’s own. Even the name is a translation: “istochnik” means “source” in Russian – just like “Fontcuberta” in Catalan.
Fontcuberta and AI
In Fontcuberta’s terms, generative AI is less a revolution than the logical continuation of the history of photography. AI makes visible what has always been true: images are constructions. What matters is therefore no longer whether an image is “real”, but what function it serves and in what context it appears.
Connection to “Face & Fiction”
My project builds directly on Fontcuberta’s thinking. Through AI-generated faces and by inserting my own identity into iconic photographs, I explore the same questions of authenticity, authorship and trust in images.
The link is clearest in Sputnik: back in 1997, Fontcuberta placed his own face into a seemingly documentary photo story. What he did then with retouching and invented archives, I do today with generative AI – as a contemporary tool for making the construction of photographic reality visible.
Recommended reading
- El beso de Judas. Fotografía y verdad (1997)
- La cámara de Pandora. La fotografí@ después de la fotografía (2010)
- La furia de las imágenes. Notas sobre la postfotografía (2016)