Joan Fontcuberta sows doubts about the origin of Vivian Maier

origin

Joan Fontcuberta sows doubts about the origin of Vivian Maier

Joan Fontcuberta is one of the funniest, most controversial and great photographic figures that we have in Spain. He is a person who constantly plays with the viewer who has to always be very attentive to his words because we will never know if they are true. It cannot be read literally. It is very important to analyze each and every one of your words to really know what you are saying. And in a 2017 conference, which was published a week ago, it makes us doubt the existence of Vivian Maier. Is Fontcuberta forcing us to think about the reality of photography?

Joan Fontcuberta is a photographer but above all he is a thinker of the image, more than a philosopher. It has all the awards we can dream of: National Photography Award 1998, National Essay Award 2011, Hasselblad Award 2013 … I think we cannot find anyone more complex in the world of photography with the clearest ideas.

In ‘The Kiss of Judas’, a fundamental essay on his work, he questions the widespread belief that photography is evidence of reality. And that you bet without hesitation in everything that has a halo of reality without stopping to think about what we are seeing or what they are saying to us.

He has always believed that the good photographer is one who lies the truth well. And therefore you have to be very attentive to everything he says and, above all, how he says it so as not to fall into the trap. A dialogue with him can turn into a game. Look at everything he says in the conference he gave in 2017 at the Mast Foundation in Bologna and which was published this week. In the middle it talks about the figure of Vivian Maier.

Joan Fontcuberta’s XB project

The conference, which was published a week ago, begins with a warning from the author himself to the attendees advising them that they already know how they are being spent. His strategy is based on using the fake as a mechanism not to deceive, but to make a pedagogy that reveals the tricks of the deceit and that helps the viewer to react critically to the avalanche of images of today.

Tells us that we have to doubt everything and that we cannot be sure of anything in this age that we live in. Photography has been an instrument to impose certainties and these can obey dark interests. We must always doubt to be sure of the information we receive. The truth does not exist for him, the truth is a search. You always have to try to find the facts or the experiences, or simply the perceptions that we have of reality.

And from that moment delves into a self-criticism about the truth in the world of photography. And how he has created various projects that cause mistrust and force us to check the information about all the photographic discoveries that we have experienced in recent years …

Most of the projects he talks about are well known in the world of photography. And it is known that they are part of his proposal, of his intellectual games

The artist and photography

It was a project in which featured mythical artists and their relationship with photography. He organized installations in various museums where he does not present himself as an artist, but as a historian.

And he made believe that Picasso or Dalí or Miró were related to the camera. To achieve this, he exhibited works made by him with the aesthetics of those geniuses. It is noteworthy to see how he played with the viewer.

Trepat

It is a very curious story. In Lleida (Catalonia) there is the Trepat factory, of agricultural machinery. It was founded in 1914 and had to close in the crisis of the seventies. Throughout the 20th century it was present in the Spanish market. And he created a very important photographic archive of all the material he sold.

This photographic catalog followed the trends of the 20th century, as did all the companies of the time. And he just put a name and did a couple of tricks to pretend that some of those photographs were made by great authors like Man Ray. And he invented the facet of Mr. Trepat as a philanthropist who invited famous photographers to work with him …

And he does everything without lying, he only works with confusion and with the magic of language. Quite a formal discovery of an exhibition that took place at the Arles festival, in which he was artistic director …

The Invention of Photographers and Vivian Maier

And this is where the most curious thing about the conference arrives and what we have to see and observe with great attention to know if it is telling us the truth or we simply believe in everything it tells us. He loves to invent photographers and is convinced that it is very easy because we all want to believe in fantastic stories.

In minute 22 he confesses to being the creator of Vivian Maier. And he explains how he did it, the tools he used to achieve what would be one of the greatest deceptions in the world of photography. And that would make us ask ourselves many things and that the experts recognize that they had not noticed the ruse carried out by Joan Fontcuberta.

He used the story of the fortuitous find and the infinite possibilities that exist today to flesh out a non-existent piece of news. But for it to be credible he didn’t have to show up, so convinced a colleague of his from Chicago to do all the paper.

They started moving a file with the story of a dark and sinister Mary Poppins photographer who never showed her photographs … All with the intention of showing that it is very easy to build a successful author through a cultural and economic ideology …

In the conference he continues talking about other authors that he claims to have invented, such as Charles Jones, a photographer who was the gardener of an English lord. And his work anticipates the work of great masters like Edward Weston and his famous pepper. Or a photographer who attracted a lot of attention in Spain who, again, is totally invented: Ximo Berenguer.

You can watch the conference over and over again to find out if everything we have told is true. It’s from 2017, it appears now. It may be a lie, it may be a fake that Fontcuberta likes so much. But surely from this moment on we will pay more attention to all the news to be sure of reality. It does not consist of distrusting everything, but of being well informed. After watching the video, what do you think?

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