Joan Fontcuberta: A través del espejo

With " A través del espejo "Joan Fontcuberta and Joaquín Gallego brings together more than three hundred anonymous self-portraits from the Internet.

Individual, couple or group self-portraits, taken in public or private spaces, with cameras or mobile phones that capture different situations, gestures and poses in which the photographer wishes to portray himself, give a good account of the social extension of iconophilia in an era in which the exhibition of the intimate seems to have become the common expression of subjectivity. Accessible to anyone and aimed at the potential gaze of the ‘other’ on the Net, they are reproduced here following the anonymous flow of their circulation on the Internet, in random series that seem to function by accumulation, but whose effect is the annulment or disappearance of the intimate for the sake of the spectacular dimension in which their visibility is promoted.

The texts published alongside these photographs propose different interpretative keys from which to approach a reflection, in the light of these images, on the modes of representation of subjectivity and intimacy. Thus, Joan Fontcuberta, in his foundational essay ‘La danza de los espejos (identidad y flujos fotográficos en internet)’, establishes a new stage in the interpretation of the history of photography, indicating in this unprecedented anthropological and visual phenomenon, a before and an after in its historical course.

The art critic Estrella de Diego, in ‘Espejos sin alinde’, proposes a revision of the questions surrounding the concepts of autobiography and self-portraiture.

The third text, by the semiologist Roman Gubern, ‘El espejo es el ojo del alma’ (‘The mirror is the eye of the soul’), presents this photographic compilation as a sample of the evolution of the ‘society of the spectacle’ into a ‘voyeur society’ (‘if you are not visible, you don't exist’).

The photographer Alberto García-Alix, in ‘La guerilla de los espejos’, interprets this new photographic phenomenon in a political key and proposes a transgressive attitude in the face of the globalisation of images.

The philosopher and psychoanalyst Jorge Alemán, in his ‘Especulaciones’, takes up the Lacanian concept of ‘extimacy’ in an essay halfway between fiction and reality (the ‘extimus’ is not reflected in the mirror).

352 Pictures

Flexbinder con faja serigrafiada

392 pages

20 x 15 cm

2010