Against Barthes: The Eye and the Index
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Paperback with flap
12.5 x 19.5cm,
192 pages
ISBN 978-1-915743-62-6
Published by MACK, October 2024
Joan Fontcuberta
17,00€
The gesture of pointing is the perfect embodiment of photography’s function as a visual document: an injunction to look at this. In this textual and visual essay, artist Joan Fontcuberta takes the index finger as his point of departure for an insightful and irreverent consideration of photography’s relation to indexicality. He refutes, as well as draws on, Roland Barthes’s suggestion that every photograph tells us ‘this has been’ (‘ca a ete’), reckoning with the inconvenient multiplicity of thises in any given image. If a photograph constitutes such a statement – as made explicit in images that include a pointing finger – does the camera witness reality or performance? These existential issues are further complicated by the emergence of post-photography and generative AI.
In this typically engaging and iconoclastic essay, Fontcuberta destabilises our ideas about the authority and authoriality of images, drawing on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and his own autobiography. His text is interleaved between two compelling visual essays formed of images from the archive of Mexican tabloid Alerta from the 1960s to 1980s, in which the pointing index finger forms a haunting and often humorous through-line.
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Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) is one of the most internationally renowned Catalan photographers. He is also a theoretician of the photographic image and photography editor, and has taken part in numerous events, debates and exhibitions of contemporary photography. He was one of the founders of PhotoVision (1980), a bilingual publication in Spanish and English dedicated to photography. Through his theoretical and artistic work he questions the so-called truthfulness of the photographic image. His multifaceted production focuses on the authenticity of the image and its capacity to represent and supplant the real world. Fontcuberta is interested in the social function of photography, the public use of the image and information overload. Many of his works are articulated as parodies that create an illusion for the viewers, while warning them of the dangers of credulity and the misleading mechanisms used in the transmission of information and knowledge. Among this theoretical texts are: Estética fotográfica (Gustavo Gili, 1982), El beso de Judas. Fotografía y verdad (Gustavo Gili, 1997), Ciencia y fricción: fotografía, naturaleza y artificio (Mestizo, 1998) and La cámara de Pandora (Gustavo Gili, 2010).
Since the late eighties, Fontcuberta has exhibited regularly in some of the most prestigious art centres, such as Folkwang Museum, Essen (1987), MoMA, New York (1989), IVAM, Valencia (1992), Musée Redpath de Montreal, Canada (1999), The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida (2003), Fundació Miró, Palma de Mallorca (2007), Australian Centre of Photography, Sydney (2007), Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2010) and Fotografins Hus, Stockholm (2013). Among his many awards is the prestigious Hasselblad International Award in Photography, 2013. His work is included in major collections such as MoMA, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Centre Pompidou, Paris, FNAC, Paris and MACBA, Barcelona, among others.
