Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]

 I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography. 
 Photography is written; photography has a narrative structure, it is articulated like any other system of signs. An individual photograph is, for me, a line of prose that should come before and come after others with the intention of stating something complex. 
 The idea that photography lies is based on a complete misunderstanding of what photography actually is or does. Photographs, by themselves, don’t do anything. They’re just photographs. But they can be made to tell a story or tall tale or outright lie when they are being placed in context, when they’re used to tell a story that might or might not be true. 
 Photography begins as an informational medium and is transformed into a work that people go to see looking for aesthetic and emotional values as a way of participating in an artistic experience. 
 Everybody has Photoshop at home and even children have fun distorting their own snapshots, so that the notion of respect for an image as testimony does not have a leg to stand on because we have learned how easy it is to manipulate images. 
 I’m not interested in photography because of the camera, lenses, and developing processes, but because it is the repository for all of those intellectual conflicts, all of the problems human have had to deal with in these last decades. I think the twentieth century has been defined by that vision, the photographic culture. 
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