
Against Barthes: The Eye and the Index
Joan Fontcuberta(Author)
Mack (Publisher)
Published on 1. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
978-1-915743-93-0 (ISBN)
Description
The gesture of pointing is the perfect embodiment of photography's function as a visual document: an injunction to look at this. In this textual and visual essay, artist Joan Fontcuberta takes the index finger as his point of departure for an insightful and irreverent consideration of photography's relation to indexicality. He refutes, as well as draws on, Roland Barthes's suggestion that every photograph tells us 'this has been' ('ca a ete'), reckoning with the inconvenient multiplicity of thises in any given image. If a photograph constitutes such a statement - as made explicit in images that include a pointing finger - does the camera witness reality or performance? These existential issues are further complicated by the emergence of post-photography and generative AI.
In this typically engaging and iconoclastic essay, Fontcuberta destabilises our ideas about the authority and authoriality of images, drawing on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and his own autobiography. His text is interleaved between two compelling visual essays formed of images from the archive of Mexican tabloid Alerta from the 1960s to 1980s, in which the pointing index finger forms a haunting and often humorous through-line.
In this typically engaging and iconoclastic essay, Fontcuberta destabilises our ideas about the authority and authoriality of images, drawing on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and his own autobiography. His text is interleaved between two compelling visual essays formed of images from the archive of Mexican tabloid Alerta from the 1960s to 1980s, in which the pointing index finger forms a haunting and often humorous through-line.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
ISBN-13
978-1-915743-93-0 (9781915743930)
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Schweitzer Classification