Postphotography: The Revenge of Images
Friday, February 13, 2015, at 18:30
Concordia University, EV-1.605
Joan Fontcuberta, "Through the Looking Glass, interactive photo projection," 2010.
Joan Fontcuberta
Artist and guest curator for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2015
Images are striking back! The twentieth century has been dramatically iconoclast. Avant-garde artists have aggressed the image in every possible way: breaking, fragmenting, distorting, rearranging, displacing, uprooting ... It is time for images to take revenge. So they are overwhelming us with an asphyxiating avalanche.
Images are now produced massively. They circulate throughout the Internet and the social networks. They sleep in the Cloud but when they wake up, they get furious. The proliferation of cheap cameras and digital platforms have brought us to the current situation of visual bulimia and a bloated surfeit of images. Photos are cost-free, unlimited, immediate, and immaterial. In most cases they are also banal and aimed at mass-consumption. Is there any chance of resisting that photo tsunami? How is new generation of photographers attempting to respond critically?
For nearly four decades of prolific dedication to photography, Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) has developed an artistic and theoretical practice, which focuses on the conflicts between nature, technology and truth. His solo exhibitions have been organized by MoMA (New York) and the Chicago Art Institute, among others, and his work has been collected by major institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the National Gallery of Art (Ottawa) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). He has written a dozen books about aspects of history, aesthetics, and epistemology of photography, and has curated international exhibitions, both historical and contemporary. In 1982 he was the co-founder of Primavera Fotogràfica, a photography biennale in Barcelona, and in 1996 was appointed artistic director for the Arles Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie. Joan Fontcuberta was the 2013 recipient of Hasselblad Foundation Award. He is currently the guest curator for the Mois de la Photo à Montréal, to be held in September 2015.
