Gallery Visit: Joan Fontcuberta - Datascapes, Usher Gallery, Lincoln.

Joan Fontcuberta is a Catalan artist. He was born in Barcelona in 1955. He studied communications at the Autonomous University of Barcelona from 1972 - 1977 and also worked in advertising and journalism before becoming a professor of fine arts at the University of Barcelona in 1979. In 1986 he resigned his professorship to devote hus full attention to creative practice. Self-taught in photography, Fontcuberta has often stressed the role that a background in communications has played in his work.

This exhibition is in two parts the first is entitled Orogenesis. At first sight the very large 'photographs' in this part of the exhibition appear to be spectacular landscape photographs. Spectacular they are but traditional photographs they are not. Each large 'photograph' is paired with an original piece of art work. In each case the original art work has been electronically scanned and re-imaged using Terragen, a landscape-rendering programme originally developed for military and scientific use. The resulting image is a very realistic 'landscape photograph,. An example is illustrated below. The landscape image (on the right) consists of a series rugged peaks and steep valleys digitally rendered with photorealistic accuracy. The image is based on Paul Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (1900).
This part of the exhibition was quite disorienting and extremely thought provoking.

The second part of the exhibition was entitled Googlegrams. Here original photographs have been reconstructed using a freeware programme connected to Google's on-line search engine. When confronted with the large images they appear to be large format photographic reproductions of famous iamges. As they inspected more closely it becomes clear, however, that the images themselves are composites of thousands of tiny digital images that have been arranged to carefully recreate the original photograph. The photomasic freeware progamme used is traditionally used in graphic design. This type of software reconstructs a selected photograph out of thousands of images. Fontcuberta, however, goes one step further. He also connects the software to the internet. Users are asked to input specific keywords into the Google search engine. The selected images are then assembled together into a larger composite, already chosen by Fontcuberta. For instance the Googlegram: Trio 2006 was originally a group portrait of Tony Blair, George Bush and Jose Maria Aznar. The Google search criteria were famous trios and expressions that evoke the number 3 including, the three little pigs, the three musketeers, the three graces, the 'three sad tigers', menage a trois, the Holy Trinity, the three wise men, 'trio Matamoros'.










Again Fontcuberta has produced thought provoking and in some cases disturbing images using technology as much as photography.