[Fall 2023]

By Nicolas Mavrikakis

[Excerpt]

Manifeste pour une post-photographie
Joan Fontcuberta
Arles, Actes Sud, 2022, 80 pages

The artist, critic, professor, and theoretician Joan Fontcuberta has written a manifesto in which he takes an unvarnished look at issues and, especially, anxieties surrounding how photographs, and the image in general, seem to be changing in nature under the sway of technology and the Internet. It seems that a new form of photography has emerged since the 1990s, along with “smart” phones and computers, complemented by software such as Photoshop and websites such as Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, and TikTok. Digital technology has changed the ontological nature of the image, and globalization of the Internet has propelled these changes to a higher level, deeply affecting all human life. This hypothesis is promoted by many and repeated ad nauseam, and it’s one of the intellectual premises of the book. To define this new situation of the image, Fontcuberta uses the term “post-photography,” which was coined by the Montreal artist and professor David Tomas in the magazine SubStance55 in 1988. It should be noted that the manifesto gives pride of place to contemporary Quebec photographers – a rare thing in books on current art, despite the proliferation of books claiming to offer a panoramic view of art in the era of globalization and decolonization. Fontcuberta discusses Chuck Samuels, Michel Campeau, and Jon Rafman alongside Martin Parr, Matthias Wähner, and Vik Muniz…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Manifeste pour une post-photographie, Joan Fontcuberta — Nicolas Mavrikakis ]