My acknowledgments go first to Greg Hobson, who just introduced me in a very enthusiast
way.
This probably creates some expectations and I hope that I will deserve those nice comments.
So this institution is hosting right now a comprehensive exhibition of some of my projects.
I started in the early 70s, I've been a prolific artist, I don't consider this presentation
a kind of anthology or a retrospective, I've been quite prolific and this is just a taste
of some of my main concerns.
But having those works very close, I would prefer to deal with my general concerns and
talk about projects which are not so well known or which are not presented right now.
I'm interested in documentary photography for several reasons, I will explain them along
my talk.
I think that a documentary photographer is someone who is sending an eye in the distance.
We receive photographs and we can perceive reality as if we were witnessing of that situation.
So I like this idea of traveling eye, but my work is not following this task, this function.
I would say, okay, photography is an eye, my task would be somehow to be an ophthalmologist
because we should test the accuracy of the eye, sometimes we should adjust the accuracy
of the eye.
And my work is a reflection on the eye, on the photographer's eye.
Why we provide to photography that confidence, why we read photography in a specific way?
I mean, all these kind of questions have challenged my career and I've been trying to supply some
answers and in doing so, I've been also raising other questions.
I like to talk about images, this will be a very visual presentation about what's going
on around.
And the last time I was in London, because of the installation of the show, I was amazed
at that advertising in the subway system.
That monkey stole our camera, wow, well, it didn't happen to me, I've been traveling
subways long time and well, I have a bad experience with big pockets, but never, they were monkeys.
And they were interested in my wallet, not in my camera, so why a monkey should steal
our camera?
I was thinking, well, of course, advertising, they try to shock us, that's their strategy.
But the only idea that some advertising creatives in working in the department of the agency
doing their brainstorm, could imagine that this situation could ever happen, made me
think about what's the interest of monkeys holding a camera?
Of course, the idea of insurance, we now photographers should hold an insurance in case that monkeys
steal our camera.
And I never thought, but I promise that I will go to my insurance company and I will
include that clause in the future.
But then I remembered that time ago there was a quite interesting situation that probably
you are familiar with, a British wildlife photographer called David Slater, photographing
in Indonesia, in the North Sulawesi Island, had a great experience with a group of black
macaques, crested macaques.
In 2011, he was doing a reportage when David Slater pretends that one of monkeys, a female,
approached his camera, so its face reflected and started playing, and suddenly picked up
the camera and hold it and took a self-portrait.
As far as I know, this is the first selfie taken by a monkey.
And it's great because probably I now understand why monkeys need to steal cameras because
they want to take selfies.
But being serious, I think that this is an interesting opportunity to debate first authorship
and, secondly, maybe copyright issues and a lot of problems that condition our work
as photographers.
I wonder if you are familiar with the going on of the history behind that selfie.
The image was published in the front cover of many publications, many newspapers, magazines,
of course, it was funny, and even the funny thing was that Wikipedia for the entrance
of crested macaques included that picture, that portrait.
The photographer, David Slater, claimed that he was the author of the picture and requested
Wikipedia to remove the reproduction from the page.
They didn't agree, there was a legal process, and finally the U.S. court, the copyright
office, decided that, and that's very interesting, artworks produced by divine acts, by plants
or by animals, haven't an author, have not an author, and they are in the public domain.
This means David Slater was not able to pretend to be the author of this picture.
The author was the monkey, but monkeys have no copyright.
So this is, again, an interesting situation which, if we take it in a philosophical level
in a theoretical level, deals with not only the problem of authorship, what's an author,
who is the owner of a picture, but also about the future of photography.
And regarding that, let's talk about the future, or if you allow me, let's talk about
the future in a way which is presented in science fiction.
You will probably know a classic, Planet of Apes, released in 1968, according to a novel
by French writer Pierre Boulle.
And in that story, U.S. space vessel lived off in 1974, and because of some strange situations,
came back in 3978, at that age, 3978, the monkeys master the earth, and they hunt humans,
and they take pictures, as we were doing in 19th century.
So this is the future of photography.
The future photographers will be monkeys, okay?
I'm doing this presentation because I've been very interested in that series in photographs
made by animals, or at least in a creative process in which animals have some collaboration.
And I would present, for instance, a sample.
In 1994, I should travel to the Saloniki in Greece, and I realized that my flight was
going from Barcelona, where I live, to Munich, and then from Munich in Germany to the Saloniki.
And that, in our flying corridor, we were going to fly over Sarajevo.
It was the moment of the Yugoslavian War.
And when we were flying over Sarajevo, the captain announced it over the loudspeaker system.
I looked through the window, just a placid sea of clouds, oblivious of the savagery that
was taking place below.
This paradox moved me to create the work that would deal with the fragility of experience
and the necessity of knowledge beyond experience.
A few weeks later, I went to the Canary Islands in Spain, which is the only place where the
tradition of cockfights is still alive.
And then I set a mock fight, consisting in situating a kind of cope with an exposed light-sensitive
paper.
A cock would have its feet dipped in photographic developer, the other in fixer.
As they moved about on the paper, one would make its footprints in dark tones, while the
other would appear in light tones, a procedure that I already experienced previously with
other kind of animals.
And I called that zography.
The idea was that the final result, of course, a kind of abstract imprint of food context
or just drops of developer, but also the organic matter, which was the result of this violent
confrontation, was going to provide a kind of landscape, a landscape which could be understood
as a metaphor of the war, as a metaphor of the aggression.
This is the result.
For those ignorant of the situation, this is just an unknown representation of something,
but the process brings us close to an idyllic vision in which the kind of calligraphy of
the fighting dance, of the violence, of the confrontation of the two powers, of the contender's
strategies, can be found past this superficial impression.
It does not deal with the description of the squabble, so much as with its own track, its
physical record.
Is this not precisely what we call a document?
But then when we were going to the details, we were able to clean out some of these shapes
and finally arrive to a kind of alphabet, to a kind of language.
So to me, this is a very simple way to reflect the feeling that the artist's gesture should
be a kind of criticism of images, criticism of language, because languages, images, and
visual perceptions, visual representations are never innocent, they always relate to
something behind.
I've been always interested in this idea of illusion, of appearance, and reality in the
backwards.
And I would like to illustrate that with another project which I tentatively titled Palimpsest.
You know, Palimpsest is writing over a writing, when in former times, in the medieval times,
paper or writing materials, where so scarce and expensive, a single surface, were used
for different messages.
I mean, when the text was not useful any longer, it was erased, and another writing could be
there.
Again, there was a traveling which inspired me, I was in Japan, and in a small village,
I discovered the technique of ukiyoke, which are fish prints.
In some fishing villages, fishers, when they came back from the sea with the fish they
had captured, they took some of them, deep in ink, and pressed on a paper, and what
you see is the quality of the fish, the price, the weight, and so on.
So this is advertising.
But in this case, it's a kind of truthful advertising.
We cannot exaggerate the dimensions of the fish.
The imprint is forcing us to accurate the exact size of the fish.
So I thought that this idea of print, which is so related to the photographic nature,
could be also challenged.
In photography, this idea of having the prints without the intervention of the camera is
as old as photography itself.
Here you have an example by British pioneer, Fox Talbot.
He collected some botanical specimens, set them onto the photographic emulsion, producing
exposure, and the shadows were recorded by the action of light and developer.
The same as Anna Adkins and Dixon did with the famous cyanotype series.
This technique, known as photogram, was taken over during the avant-garde movement, and
other artists, like Man Ray, used them for experimental reasons.
This is a radiograph from 1922.
I was interested then to test if the sense of objectivity in photography was based in
this idea of record, in this idea of imprint.
I believe that the myth of objectivity is relying in two different reasons.
One, this imprint nature, the fact that there's an indexical nature, the photograph, and the
reference, the object, have a physical connection.
But the other, because for the first time in history, photographs were made by machines,
which were outside our body.
Previously, the artists were using a pencil or brush, but were using the hand.
So the final image was the transformation, the translation of some brain instructions
to our hand to produce a visual, a graphic representation.
But for the first time in history, photographers had a kind of device outside the body, outside
the hand, and we delegate, we transfer to that machine outside us the task to represent
the world.
And because of this distance, because of this separation, we introduce this idea of a result
being autonomous, being objective.
Let's go to the recording nature, to the imprint.
I was interested in proving how this was not always so clear that the index will lead us
necessarily to the accurate depiction of the objects, of reality.
And I was trying to prove that with conceptual use of photographs.
I was going to start different photographs, but I was not going to do them on a conventional
photographic paper, but using already existing illustration, already existing images.
Imagine you have wallpaper.
Usually wallpaper is illustrated with flowers, with butterflies, with birds, I mean all kind
of ornamental figures, mostly taken from the organic world, from nature.
So what's going on if I take this piece of wallpaper and in my lap, in the darkness,
I layer it with photographic emulsion, with light sensitive materials, and then I look
for the same actual flowers and for the same actual bird and place them on top of the illustrations
and then produce the exposure to light.
So now you see the photograph as those of Fox Talbot and Men Ray, but inside the window
of the shadow there's still the original illustration.
So this process confronts the viewer with a duplication of images, a palimpsest.
There are two strata of visual representations, at one hand the painting, at the other the
photograph, at one hand a symbol, at the other the index, and of course they are not coincident.
And that gap, that distance, is the distance between probably reality and illusion, it's
the distance between document and fiction, or it's the distance between the kitsch of
decoration against the objectivity of science.
I've been expanding this idea to many different materials which include visual representation
of natural objects, for instance wallpaper as you see, but also packaging, these are
boxes, Kleenex boxes, or a silk sleeping dress, or even I went to the flea markets and bought
anonymous paintings, still lifes, that again I covered with photographic emulsion, with
light sensitive emulsion and in this case I look for actual roses and place them on top
of the painted ones and produce the photograph with again this kind of dialogue between the
shadows and the painted roses.
Immediately I tried to do the same with original paintings like Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet and
so on, and went to different museums when no curator allowed me to replicate that idea
with their pieces in the collection and I was very frustrated so I thought that I should
use posters, reproductions.
So I went to the Pompidou, I went to the Tate, I went to the MoMA, I went to different important
institutions and bought several posters for exhibitions or just reproductions of some
of the still lifes in their collections to go on with this issue, for instance this is
a Matisse and this is the result, this is a Van Gogh and this is the result, this is
a Cezanne, Monet, again a Matisse, in this case he used golden fish, he painted golden
fish but unfortunately I went to the market and I only found sardines so there was a kind
of metamorphosis, a kind of transformation.
In Matisse, Botticelli, De La Roche and I was expanding this idea to different materials
which included the representation of organic objects, body fragments, plants, animals and
so on, even porno magazines, this is my studio doing a replica of the Mamoiselle d'Avignon
by Picasso.
So I've been doing this kind of projects for a long time in which I investigate the true
nature of photography but this idea of reflecting on the print as the deepest sense of photographic
truth in photography could be also expanded in narratives or in series as those presented
here in the museum.
So let me switch to this other direction of my work, yesterday I arrived from Barcelona
and at Gadwick I found that advertising which is also a good reception for me.
Truth is stranger than fiction, in this case some advertising for a novel or I don't know
but I enjoyed the fact that this was the slogan for that and I do agree, truth is always stranger
than fiction and fiction has been also an interesting poll in my work and I would like
to explain the roots of that interest.
As I mentioned I started in the early 70s, I myself thought as an artist, I never studied
art history or visual arts, I studied instead communications and work for three years in
advertising and journalism.
Probably this was my school for lying, I was familiar to the lying techniques to seduction
to illusion and all these kind of strategies and besides that in Spain there was still
the Francoist dictatorship which was imposing a landscape of censorship and propaganda.
Probably all this mixed up pushed me to take the camera as a tool to unveil all the tricks
that were used in the political system, in advertising, in the mass media and so on.
We were so confident in the objectivity of photography that my task was going to be to
deconstruct this confidence, try to be a kind of advocate for doubt, for skeptical attitudes
toward that power, that authority that photography was holding over the viewers.
Then my first works were Photomontage in which I was mixing at one hand an iconography from
counterculture and neodadaism which were very present after the late 60s but also taking
some visual techniques from advertising, the search of the shocking images which were very
strong in terms of graphism.
Well by little I was evolving to a more major interest and this is a photograph, a straight
shot that I took at the Museum of Natural History here in London in 1977 and it was important
to me because it taught me that this kind of surreal atmosphere was not necessarily to
be fabricated, I mean a clever eye was able to unveil this kind of mystery, this kind
of enigma from reality itself when the situations were providing it, for instance a Museum of
Natural History is offering the visitors these situations.
If we understand the whole scene we will probably realize that this phone is to provide some
information about skills, about biological behavior and so on but if we avoid all this
surrounding information to the viewer probably we'll get confused and then we should project
different meanings, we should project different phantoms on the image and I was interested
in this kind of situations, I was working long time in the Museum of Natural History
and Botanical Gardens because somehow there were situations in which nature got artificialized.
This was for instance the Museum of Geology in Barcelona and this was a corridor going
to the staff offices or this is a Museum of Natural History in Madrid between showcase
with rabbits to teach the genetic Mendels law or this was Botanical Garden in Barcelona
where the cacti got like that after freezing winter time.
So now probably you understand why in the early 80s I jump to another idea which was
the Herbarium series which is presented here.
In the Herbarium series I mix at one hand our surprise at some of the wonders of nature,
these are dry fruits I found just in front of my place in Barcelona, I don't know which
kind of botanical seeds or fruits or whatever are but they look like jewels, like architectural
ornaments.
Sometimes nature is really surprising for instance this is a picture of the amorphophallus
titanum which is supposed to be the largest flower in the world which is also called corpse
flower because it's smelling very badly, it's odor, it's reminiscent of the smell of the
composing animal or organic matter and this is attracting flies and other insects to produce
the pollination and because of that it's a quite popular plant which is only growing
in Indonesia, only a few botanical gardens in the western world have been able to have
one of these species in their holdings and when looking at that, when looking at those
kind of natural wonders, you could start asking yourself is that true, I mean is nature able
to produce this kind of species and well now you have internet, you have Google, you can
check but I would answer yes, I mean verify what I'm telling, you will see that this is
not of one of my inventions but it could be illustrations, this is a Basilius Bessler
from the 17th century on photography, Blasfeld and this is introducing us to this confrontation
of reality and fiction. Dealing again with authorship, I would like to show briefly a
project which is called The Artist and the Photograph in which I pretend that I'm historian
and I found some test, some proof, some sketches by important artist for instance Picasso,
John Miro and so on, I borrowed some pictures, some portraits of those artists and I did
small photo montage to make them become photographers and then I show some catalogs actually Picasso
did collaborations with photographers for instance Andre Villiers, they produced some
collaborative pieces with cutouts done by Picasso and linescapes by Villiers, they were
working in Caen in the French Riviera and I claim that a researcher suddenly found an
envelope with discarded works, for instance these are original Picasso and Villiers pieces
and this is one mysteriously found in that envelope, this is an actual Picasso piece
and again this is one of these strangely found discarded pictures supposedly authored by
Picasso and Villiers, again this is an original by Picasso but we have doubts about that or
about that or about that or about that, well I presented those findings in the Picasso
Museum in Malaga, his birth town in Spain and I never said we found original Picasso's
works which were unknown, I just said those sketches will teach us to understand the creative
process done by the master, by the genius, I was not saying Picasso but everybody in
the Picasso Museum understood that I was referring to Picasso, so I was not lying but
I was forcing the Villiers, the visitors to understand equivocally what I was pretending
and the next day, I mean the day after the opening, all the newspapers in Malaga had
headlines telling unknown works by Picasso presented in his museum, of course my artwork
was that, the series of newspaper clippings which were buying the whole story, which were
projecting their prejudices, were projecting their willing that actually they were original
Picasso's, the same with Miro, these are collages found and they could be the result
of a collaborative with Jacim Gomes, a friend of his, they worked together, Dali, Tapies,
when I did that project Tapies was the only alive artist and I invited him to come to
my studio in my darkroom, I prepared the materials and I looked for different objects which belong
to his creative universe, found objects, chairs, bags, very, very poor elements and he was playing
with them and when he left I went on and my Tapies were much better than his, when we
did an exhibition in the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona he was not able to identify the
pieces that he did in the darkroom, I mean that my own ones were absolutely much better
and this idea of authorship has been repeated recently with another project which is a trepat,
trepat is a factory of agricultural machinery in Lleida near Barcelona, it's a factory
which was founded in 1914 and I went to the archive, they have and look at the photographs
for one century, they've been taking photographs of pieces, machineries, social documentary
of workers and so on and I realized that you could unveil the whole history of photographic
avant-garde, some pictures could refer to futurism, others to Dadaism, others to surrealism,
to constructivism, Bauhaus, new objectivity and so on.
So the founder of this factory was called Josep Trepat and Mr Trepat I pretend was a
businessman traveling throughout the world to sign contracts for the factory but he was
also a person interested in the art scene, it means that sometimes he commissioned some
of the great masters along the 20th century to come to his factory and take photographs
for catalogs, for calendars, for any kind of material required for graphic communication.
So for instance these are pieces that you can find in that archive and why not, maybe
they were made by this guy, Menre, and in order to make this more convincing I changed
a little bit Menre's portrait and behind you see the Trepat factory, so in the caption
I'm not stating Menre when he went to the Trepat factory, I am much more austere, I
say portrait of Menre behind the Trepat factory and everybody understand that Menre was there
to take photographs, this famous piece of Menre with his model Merritt Oppenheim, well
maybe in Trepat he did the earlier attempt, which is this one, or Moholy Natch, who also
was in the Trepat factory, or Walker Evans, so for fortune he did those pieces and in
Trepat we find this one, Charles Schiller, the American precisionist who was doing photographs
and then transferred to paintings, well in Trepat we find also some kind of examples,
Alexander Rochenko, as you know I'm interested in new aesthetics, new vision, these special
perspectives, okay well now let's go to the Trepat archive and we find, and this is an
exhibition again in which I don't provide information, I just displayed the works and
make the viewers project their own interpretation, captions are missing, I just include numbers
and then you should go to look for the sheet of paper where there are all the data, year
of realization, name of the photographer and so on, but when you look for that piece of
paper it's missing, and people in the gallery should tell that it hasn't arrived yet because
no visitors steal it, and in the book I do the same, there's a kind of book with that
and images are reproduced and you should go to a list of plate, when you look for the
list of plate, the list is there, it's missing, this book was done in China because it's the
only place where they can tour a thousand pages in different books, so these are the
kind of projects I'm doing these days and I would like to finish again with these issues
of identity and authorship and truth and fiction with a project titled Holly Innocence, I'm
sure that you suffer from spam, scam and all these kind of things, I collect them, I've
been collecting them for a long time, especially scam, and in scam there are two different
main models, one is girls' ladies from Eastern countries or African countries who pretend
that they found your profile in Facebook and they want to establish link, friendship and
so on, and they send their pictures and they tell how nice and kind you are and that they
want to meet you and then the problem is that they have no money to pay the airfare and
if you help them to come and visit you, then the friendship is over forever, I mean that
you spend some money and you will never hate them, but my favorite ones are the Nigerian
letters, the Nigerian letters are when someone is the son of, pretend to be the son of the
prime minister of Nigeria or Ivory Coast or wherever, it has been killed and they are
having several millions in a Swiss bank and they need someone to use that money for something,
so suddenly one day I received one of these Nigerian letters by someone who pretended
to be Captain Hook, said wow, very creative name and this guy was supposed to be a captain
in the US Army in Iraq and he told me that in a patrol they found millions and millions
of money, different currency, pounds, euros, dollars and so on, probably from Saddam Hussein
officers when fleeing from the US troops entering Baghdad and this guy kept some of the money
by his own and wanted someone to help him invest it and I thought that it was a great
opportunity because of course it was a scam, it was a trick, someone fictionalizing an
identity and I thought by my own you are going to try to trick me, you will see and then
I said okay yes, I'm very interested in that but of course you should provide some proof
that you are having that money, I mean how do you want, I believe, you know I'm in Barcelona,
thousands of kilometers away, I don't know at all, so you should to provide some evidence,
okay, he sent me that photograph, said okay, okay, we are in the good direction but you
know I'm a photographer, I'm an amateur photographer and it's very distant, I would like a closer
detail and could you please send me a close up, he sent me this picture, yes, yes, okay,
good, good but maybe this is just a section, maybe you could send me more pictures and
he was sending pictures of the money, said okay, I believe, I believe, that's right,
let's do business, let me introduce myself, my name is Joan Fonco Bertha and I'm the priest
of the Sagrada Familia, the temple, the holy family, you know it's a temple by a famous
Catalan architect and this is building for decades and we have no money to finish the
building and you know what you found in Iraq will be perfect for us to finish that wonderful
architectural masterpiece and said well now I'm sending you that portrait of mine, I would
like to know who you are and he sent me his passport, said okay now let's go for the money,
what should we do and said he answered well the money has been consinked in a safe somewhere
so he was sending materials and I was questioning and we were exchanging and my idea was producing
a book, I was at that time doing an art residency in a Spanish city called, a small city called
Albarracin and being there I wanted to involve my experience in that city with all the project,
the book should have 96 pages so I was needing about 45 messages back and forth so I was
answering the messages saying today I visited the museum, there were beautiful paintings
of battles, you are a military person so probably you are interested and then I was explaining
the strategy, the city was on siege and was not able, the walls are wonderful pieces to
defend the city and he was saying yes that's very interesting but let's talk about the
money and finally when I had the messages and graphic material enough to complete the
book I sent a final email saying okay I'm sorry but the bishop just found our relationship
and it seems that the Vatican will take over so now you should deal with the Vatican people
so this is a project, a kind of artist book in which there are two kind of filters in
the book one green one red so you could say truth is red fiction is green you can go ahead
you can follow the different pages of the book and the reading, the perception will
change dramatically using a filter or the other which is the metaphor of the way we
perceive reality I mean we can filter reality with one color this is with one ideology with
one set of prejudices with one culture and you will see reality in a way or in another
it was somehow quite a sample but graphic system to prove that photography is just a
way to format our idea of reality and I think that this is a good ending for the presentation
I wanted to do and a way to explain a little bit more my concerns regarding the exhibition
which is currently in the museum thank you very much.
