Some of the most representative texts of postmodernism were published between the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the following decade, and were compiled in the books Cultura y simulacro, by Jean Baudrillard (1978), and Postmodern Culture (1983), edited by Hal Foster (“Postmodernism: A Preface”), which includes essays by, among others, Craig Owens (“Feminists and Postmodernism”), Jürgen Habermas (“Modernity – An Incomplete Project”) and Fredric Jameson (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society”). The question then was whether the time had come or not to certify the death of modernity, whose crime consisted of having made an “official culture” out of what was initially, in Foster’s words, “an oppositional movement that defied the cultural order of the bourgeoisie and the ‘false normativity’ (Habermas) of its history.” The re-reading of the grand narratives in a light-hearted if not ironic tone also marked artistic practices, gilded reflections of what was already occurring in society and politics.

Between 1982 and 1985, Joan Fontcuberta developed Herbarium, his first complete and autonomous series. With it he established a new canon: that of the questioning of truth in a medium, photography, recognised for its ability to emulate what it reproduced veraciously and efficiently. Photography has never been innocent, and it was far from it then, but Fontcuberta took arms against the credibility and almost sacred trust between the artist and the audience. What we saw was not what it seemed. Where we were supposed to see a set of strange and unusual but true and therefore surprising plant species, there was a set of constructs made out of remains of objects, rubbish and the occasional organic component found in the periphery of pre-Olympic Barcelona. If the books by the sculptor Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst (1928) and Wundergarten der Natur (1932), represent German New Objectivity, Fontcuberta’s series opened a road to the questioning of grand narratives, including those associated with photography. In his words, “both for Blossfe ldt and for me, photography serves to make the most extraordinary hybrids pass illusorily for plausible. Herbarium pretends that those montages are real plants, whilst Blossfeldt photographed real plants so that they would look like architectural ornaments. In neither case can we evade a hallucinatory allure inasmuch as the photographic image permits what is false at the level of perception to be true at the level of its presence in time.”

Indeed, “its presence in time” has continued up to now, strengthening what was then a prophetic gesture that established a genre of its own. The six photographs in the Banco de España Collection, which belong to a larger series, employ titles that try to broaden the notion of verisimilitude but at the same time magnify still further the power of their fiction. Dendrita victoriosa (1982), Braohypodafrustrata (1984) and Cardus-fipladissus (1985) are some of the titles that simulate a scientific vestige but nevertheless maintain a profound wish to overturn reality through humour and play. For Fontcuberta is an inveterate player capable of inventing a game full of complex instructions and entertaining twists, and of changing the rules half-way through the match. Over five decades, the photographer, essayist, populariser and magician that is Fontcuberta has managed to arouse the most effective of anxieties in those who view his works: the one which questions us as spectators and as subjects.

Álvaro de los Ángeles