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. 
 I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises. 
 The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive. 
 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. 
 Photography… has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination. 
 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. 
 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... 
 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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