Joan Fontcuberta
Spain, 1955-

Googlegram-2, 2005
photomosaic
46 1/2 x 62 1/2 in.

SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by PhotoFutures
2006.37

"I was 14, 15, when I first saw a picture of the earth taken from above, from one of these rockets. To me, it was a sort of paradox. The earth was the picture that was the container for all pictures - all history, all mankind, all love, everything was contained in that picture. One of my favorite writers is Jorge Luis Borges, who writes about the Aleph, the point in which the whole universe is reflected. This photograph is like the Aleph. The fact that you could go far away and look at that sphere, that was the point. For the first time, we were able to take perspective, look at ourselves from that distance, and realize that all wars and conflicts were small things in the context of the universe and eternity." - Joan Fontcuberta


RESEARCH PAPER

BIOGRAPHY

Joan Fontcuberta describes himself as 'self-taught in photography' and considers himself 'a conceptual artist using photography.' His interest in the visual arts stems from his background in advertising. He was a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, professor of Audiovisual Communication at Pompeu Fabra University, also in Barcelona, and a visiting lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in 2003.

He was born February 24, 1955, in Barcelona, Spain, and spent his first twenty years under Franco's dictatorship where propaganda and censorship led him to be skeptical of authority. Additionally, his background in communications and his work as an artist, writer, editor, teacher and curator influenced his best-known works, which examine the relationship between photography and truth.

ART STYLE

What characterizes Fontcuberta's work is a unique mix of his mischievous humor - questioning existing institutions, challenging authority - and his distinctive photographic vision. He embraced Surrealism, a style with disregard for rules and the mainstream that perfectly suited Fontcuberta's personality.

With photography, he found a fitting tool for targeting the mass media, science, technology, academia, art, religion, medicine and, of course, political and government propaganda. With this goal, no subject was sacred. Additionally, he used photography to make us doubt the veracity of the photograph itself and, therefore, the media that rely upon it.

In his work, Fontcuberta has been known to 'put on' or 'play with' all forms of media and public communications. He creates what at first glance seems to be serious bodies of work and then presents them in scholarly journals, scientific books and large-scale 'legitimate' museum exhibitions. These newsworthy 'discoveries' fool even the most professional experts. Fontcuberta believes that many things observed are to be found in the eyes of the observers, not necessarily in the image itself. He asks us, the viewer, "Which is the real one? Is there a real one?"

GOOGLEGRAMS

Fontcuberta uses the technique of photomosaic, which is composing a single image out of a large number of tiny images. A specific software program for Google selects graphic samples from a bank of available images on the Internet. It then places these images, according to their chromatic value and density, in the position that most closely coincides with the image that is being created by the artist. Fontcuberta's Googlegrams represent today's media culture, presenting an archive built of many decentralized voices competing for attention.

The thousands of images that comprise the Googlegrams, in their diminutive role as tiles in a mosaic, become a visual representation of the anonymous discourse of the Internet. Fontcuberta believes that the Internet itself is "the supreme expression of a culture which takes for granted recording...and...archiving...images, something inherent in a whole range of human action, from the most private and personal to the most overt and public." With his characteristic sense of mischief, he brings these images together in a provocative demonstration of media navigation. He feels that although we like to think of the Internet as a vast, open, democratic structure, channels of access to information are still mediated by political or corporate interest.

GOOGLEGRAMS-2, 2005 - Permanent collection of SBMA

"Googlegram-2, 2005" is a photomosaic reproduction of the Apollo XVII photograph of Earth taken in 1972. Though at first glance it may look like the United States, it is in fact the Horn of Africa and the African Continent.

For "Googlegram-2, 2005", Fontcuberta used Google image searches to randomly cull from the Internet by controlling only the search engine criteria with the input of specific key words such as "sky" and "purgatory". These Google-selected images were then assembled into a larger image of Fontcuberta's choosing, displaying an often challenging relationship between words and pictures. The resulting 10,000 images were assembled to reproduce our Apollo XVII photograph of Earth. Up close, the individual cells have stories of their own to tell. All together and when we stand back, they are the Earth.

Bibliography

An Evening with Joan Fontcuberta, Museum of Photographic Arts,
February, 1986

Frottogrammes - Joan Fontcuberta - Nov/Dec, 1988
Artforum, Vol. 30, march 1992
Artforum, Vol 31, February, 1993
Aperture, No. 155, spring, 1999
ARTNews, February, 2001
Contranatura, ACTAR, 2001
Imaginary Gardens, Salvador Dali Museum, 2004
Joan Fontcuberta Website
LensCulture.com
Zabriskie Gallery.com
TheBlurb.com