Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
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I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.
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The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive.
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There are religions in which the representation of the world is banned as an usurpation of the power of a God, creator of all things. It is very possible that photography is a trick of the devil and each shot is a sin.
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Photography… has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination.
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The dramatic metamorphosis from the grain of silver to the pixel represents nothing more than a screen that conceals the evolution taking place in the whole framework that provided photography with a cultural, instrumental, and historical context.
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Photography mirrored the [nineteenth century] will towards rigor, towards defining details, the need for miniscule description, the long-distance optics, for technology at the service of truth, for concepts of credibility, of objectivity, the need to archive, for the consolidation of institutions like the museum, in short, towards a need to control memory...
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Among photojournalists there is still a sense that doing a photomontage is far graver than adding a filter. I am against this type of hierarchy that demonizes some options over others, demonizes them in respect to, what—ideology or moral code?
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