Seeing

I have been reading this morning about Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta, who quite wonderfully questions truth in art and photography. He challenges our acceptance of what we 'see' through his manipulation of the medium of photography. Fontcuberta has consistently presented images that have an element of untruth. He has made work, for example, about animals such as a snake with twelve feet, apparently rediscovered.

He is listed on the website www.the-artists.org.

On the Gallery 51 website, Fontcuberta is described -

"As an artist he asks the public to look, nothing more. He asks us to look with our eyes because he knows that we often look with our memory, protected by the veil of knowledge, experience and recollection..."

Photography is about looking, and capturing. Yet looking is less straightforward the more we consider it, and thus the capturing is also convoluted. As Fontcuberta reminds us, we are informed by our prior understandings and it is important to try to see with a freshness of vision.

I also recently saw a quote by Dorothea Lange

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera"

This is where photography is most interesting... where it leads us to other avenues... where we can consider it as a tool - for seeing.