English Language Hardcover Edition: 23 x 31 cm. Very good condition clean and unmarked "cushioned" pictorial-boards.
Joan Fontcuberta tries to put the real into Dalí's Surrealism. In this first major monograph to be published in the United States by one of Spain's most prominent and innovative artists, Fontcuberta subjects various imaginative landscapes--among them ones by Cézanne, Turner and Weston in addition to Dalí, as well as photographs of his own body--to the manipulation of landscape-rendering software originally designed for the military and scientific communities. The limited visual vocabulary of the programs translates contours (like floppy clocks) into natural elements such as hills, rivers, clouds and the like. The result, actually, looks far from real. As Fontcuberta says, In a typically surrealistic caper, introducing the critical-paranoid method in the technological heart of the computer, Dalí's dreams become equally impossible landscapes. And, he might have added, gorgeous black-and-white ones.
One of Spain's most prominent and innova-
tive artists, Joan Fontcuberta is best known
for exploring the interstices between art,
science, and illusion. Where science reaches
its limits in his works, the imagination finds
a creative space in which to flourish. In Land
scapes without Memory, Fontcuberta has
co-opted a piece of computer software origi-
nally designed for military or scientific use
in rendering three-dimensional images of
landscapes. The software enables the user
to build photo-realistic models based on
information scanned from two-dimensional
sources. With this widely available "freeware"
as his starting point, Fontcuberta has created
the two series that constitute Landscapes
without Memory. In Landscapes of Landscapes
Fontcuberta uses classic landscape paintings
by masters such as Cézanne, Rousseau, and
Dali as his source material. In Bodyscapes, he
uses photographs of his own body, scanning
them into the software program to create
highly baroque, three-dimensional landscapes
As Geoffrey Batchen writes in his
introductory cssay, "In Fontcuberta's hands
photography has become a philosophical
activity, not a pictorial one. He asks us
to think as much as to look. And in this
case we are supposed to be thinking about
photography and landscape, perhaps even
about the new landscape of photography.'