Interview 2#. Joan Fontcuberta
“Emerging photographers have to look for the Flickr counter image”
In 1992, while Barcelona lived plunged into the collective effort for the Olimpic Games, the father of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first photo to the internet. Barely two decades later, more than 135,000 pictures are uploaded to Facebook every minute. On Flickr, if you search for a term like “me” you will get 77 millions of images. Today, the moment in which the flaming arrow lighted the cauldron in the Opening Ceremony would not only be immortalized in the front page of some dozen newspapers the day after, but also shared on social networks from the avid camera phones of the audience, and disseminated across the cyberspace almost infinitely in a matter of seconds. In this image abundance context, Joan Fontcuberta tries to understand the evolution of the role of the photographer, the artist and photography itself.
As well as photographer, Joan Fontuberta practices criticism, writes essays and teaches at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, and Harvard University, in Cambridge (Massachussets). Spanish National Photography Prize in 1998 and Catalan National Visual Arts Prize in 2011, his work has been acquired by museums such as the MOMA, the Metropolitan and the Pompidou. In Culturas, La Vanguardia, last May he published a very influential article titled “The post-photographic manifesto” in which he reflects on “what’s left of photography”.
In your own words, post-photography is nothing more than photography adapted to our online life…
The proliferation of cameras results in a world overloaded with images, where photos are not taken to keep moments, but rather to share them. The civilization of the image and the preponderant role of the mass media that McLuhan foretold in the sixties have been overcome. Today, photography no longer belongs to journalists, artists or specialists. It has become a natural and spontaneous way to relate with each other. Google, Facebook, YouTube or Flickr have changed our lifes and the life of photography. In this ecosystem shift, postphotography makes up a new universal language adapted to our online life.
Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser defined taking a photography as lifting a moment in history to a transhistorical level outside time and outside space.
How does this definition meet the current context, in which photography has become an act of horizontal communication?
To Flusser, if photographers accept the rules imposed on them by technology, then they become “functionaries”. On the contrary, they become creators when they rise against constraints and manage to “tear” from the camera an image for which it wasn’t designed. If anyone who writes is a writer and anyone who paints is a painter, anyone who takes photos is a photographer. However, the creator is that who informs photography with meaning and makes us question what photography actually is.
What does being a creator today involve, then?
Creation has ceased to be based upon a system in which the adresser is put on a level with the author. Today, the author is that who ascribes significance to preexisting materials. Creating is not so much to make as it is to prescribe. For instance, one day, Penélope Umbrico wanted to take a picture of a sunset. However, before taking it, it occurred to her to search on Flickr how many pictures were tagged under “sunset”. She found more than half a million. Instead of contributing to the visual pollution with another sunset, she decided to cover the walls of a museum with 10,000 photos downloaded from the Internet. It is an example of a postphotographic creation, where an erosion of the notion of authorship is at play.
In a symbolic gesture, Penélope Umbrico decided that it wasn’t necessary to take an additional picture. But there are photos that we can’t find on Flickr yet…
What she did was to refuse to accumulate in order to maintain a level of visual consumption. By doing so, she fostered a debate around the necessity to find the pictures that are missing, the ones that have been censored to us.
What pictures should emerging photographers seek, then?
They have to look for the Flickr counter image, a one that doesn’t entail an aesthetic acceptance.