Institut Ramon LLull

Revelations offers two complementary approaches to photography. In the first text, photographer and image theorist Joan Fontcuberta reflects a failed expedition to the North Pole on the pictures made by Nils Strinberg. Lost for years, they were found and restored to produce sharper positives, but to what extent was that embellishment genuine? Wasn’t the deterioration of the negatives still an accurate portrayal of reality? Fontcuberta posits that photography began with the haughty pretension of stopping time, but time ended up rebelling and exposing the private lives of photographs. Pictures, as life experiences they capture, suffer their own traumas too. In the second text, Xavier Antich’s musings are by Fontcuberta’s work directly entitled Trauma, which presents damaged images that reflect what remains of a photograph when it no longer depicts reality. The philosopher invokes the tradition begun by Walter Benjamin and defines Fontcuberta’s series as an archeology of the present. Just as Atget unmasked Paris by photographing its seedy side, Fontcuberta’s traumatized photographs point to meanings that go beyond the reality reflected within them.