Joan Fontcuberta

Museums and archives are institutions designed to preserve the memory of a community. Joan Fontcuberta rummages through their collections to find photographic documents that have deteriorated over time and, paradoxically, “lost their memory.” These fragile, ailing, amnesiac images are salvaged by a procedure that recalls the Zen technique of Kintsugi: a piece of broken pottery is not discarded, but repaired, a thread of gold marking the fracture line.

Emphasizing scars is a form of show more resilience, of acceptance of the vicissitudes of life. In Kintsugi, Joan Fontcuberta assembles a poetic and conceptual gathering of phantasmal images that evoke the passage of time, the recording of history, and the very substance of photography show less

In Traumadeutung, Joan Fontcuberta proposes the idea of sick images: photographs suffer some kind of damage (pathology) which disturbs its documentary function and disables them to "live" in an archive but gives them an extraordinary plastic uniqueness. From these images, from different Asturian photo archives, Fontcuberta has made an artist's book.

Curated by Joan Fontcuberta, this issue tackles the emergence of visual studies as a response to significant shifts in visual standards, as well as in social and technological issues, that have taken place since the 1990s. Not only does this refer to the increasing proliferation of images, but also studies the cultural repercussions of the crystallisation of reality into images. The generative, formalist, and conceptual notions that inform todays visual culture are encapsulated in these show more pages through works, analyses, and critical insight. Featuring contributions by Pierre Cordier, Gundi Falk, László Moholy-Nagy, Gottfried Jäger, Alison Rossiter, and Andrew Wright, among others. show less

This catalogue deals precisely with the evolution of the image as a result of the use of new technologies. The transit from the analog to the digital image and the globalization of access to internet and mobile telephones has radically changed the world of photography, taking it past the point of no return. This new technological potential offers still unexplored creative consequences and has shaken up key concepts such as that of authorship and original work. All over the world, many new show more artists of the image are exploring the ramifications of this genuine creative revolution. This catalogue published by RM on the occasion of the exhibition From Here On, held at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, Spain, deals precisely with the evolution of the image as a result of the use of new technologies. It constitutes an invaluable resource, not only because of the texts included really a series of manifestos but also because of the conscientious selection of artists and images offered to the reader. show less