Joan Fontcuberta – Post Photography
The democratisation of photography where everyone becomes a photographer but photography loses privilege. The Smartphone effect with its magic filters, Ai, computations and the universal language we all speak with images. Photography has become a reflex, the meal go to, a social gesture to a professional tool. The phone camera functions less as an artistic tool and more as a memory prosthetic, a social proof device , a tool of presence , Look at Me , I was here !
To photograph is no longer to represent, but to participate, its a form of Citizenship of the World.
Reading The Post-Photography Era through the prism of smartphone photography reveals that Fontcuberta was not theorising a future he was actually diagnosing a present that would soon become a universal norm.
Smartphone photography shows that , Images no longer represent reality but that they organise attention, memory, and social life. Photography has shifted from a medium to an environment
The key post photographic skill is no longer how to take photographs, but how to think with and against images.
We can think it as a radical extension of Fontcuberta’s idea that not producing images can also be a post photographic act in itself.
In terms of the workshop and future Joan Fontcuberta’s concept of post photography by using smartphone images as sites of intervention, where authorship, truth, excess, and circulation are collectively interrogated and reconfigured through practice.
Image overload is not a problem , it is the condition. Students can refuse ” the idea of the perfect shot “, instead work with screenshots, misfires, duplicates, recrops. They can analyse their camera rolls. The Smartphone zoom can treat ” failed images” into a diagnostic tool and also a finished result. We can term it an ” Camera Roll Autopsy “, students can look at for example 50 of their last images and identify patterns, repetitions and absences.
They can ask themselves What does this archive say about my habits of seeing? Turning this avalanche of images into critical material.