This is not an academic exhibition but a very naughty one”, warns Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955), who moments before had given us several headlines about Resonancias, an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Mapfre Foundation's KBr and of which he is commissioner. Who warns is not a traitor: "They are photographs of photographers who have given up taking photographs or, in other words, photographs without photographers." Gone are the days when snapshots promised memory and truth. Now they are everywhere, they can be falsified, intervened, contaminated, stolen... And, above all, they have lost authority. Welcome to the era of post-photography. To illustrate the transition between one and the other, Fontcuberta has delved into the magnificent Fundación Mapfre collection and after bringing to light the work of classics such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Helen Lewitt, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus and Emmet Gowin, he has assigned to each of them a “dance partner”. The commissioner had fun and manages to have fun.
Upon entering, along with various works by Diane Arbus, who throughout her career portrayed strange, eccentric and marginalized characters in the tradition of freak photography (giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins, bird girls, bearded women and children with dog) as a way of confronting us with the conventions and prejudices in the face of otherness, the curator has planted the parade of the monsters by Juana Gost (Soria, 1987), a booth inside whose interior - we access through a peephole - there are at breakneck speed images taken from social networks whose protagonists (scarified, anorexic, covered in piercings or self-mutilated people) have made their freakishness a choice and "a way to conquer a singularity and identity that are valued in their own communities" , he points out.
Helen Lewitt, one of the pioneers of street photography, has to dance with the Canadian Jon Rafman, who since 2008 has been collecting strange and beautiful images of ordinary people randomly captured (purse thefts, road accidents, children's games...) by Google Street View in its constant records of cities and roads.
It is also from there that the Italian Paolo Cirio -Robert Adams's partner- takes his characters, who then prints them in real size and pastes them on the walls of buildings, exactly where they were captured. Lee Friedlander's work resonates with that of Miguel Ángel Tornero, from Jaén, who builds a kind of surreal “exquisite corpses” applying software to conceive panoramas based on unconnected images of cities.
More disturbing is the evidence that intimacy is now just a relic. Next to the family images of Emmet Gowin, of which he made his great artistic and vital project, the images resulting from espionage captured by the Swiss Kurt Caviezel in homes around the world after sneaking into users' webcams.
Or the beautiful women of Garry Winogrand confronted with 180 portraits of women that the police found in the house of a murderer in Los Angeles. Both are empowered women, the latter also victims of the scourge of femicide.
