Joan Fontcuberta: post-photography and the spectral image of saturation

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe age of post-photography can be understood as the age of the inorganic image: a composite of littered information – collected, ordered, layered, buried, stored and discarded. Joan Fontcuberta is one of the leading contemporary artists to conceptualize and advance the notion of post-photography from its prior articulation concerning the digital to its current iteration as a marriage between image, technology and the Internet. By focusing on two diverse works by Fontcuberta as curator and artist – From Here On (2011) and Googlegrams (2005) – this article breaks down post-photography as a discourse, investigating its effects on how we understand the contemporary image drowned out by accumulation and how it speaks to the politics of saturation, surveillance and data in our state of constant exposure.