Masterclass with Joan Fontcuberta | Photographs in purgatory

PHOTOGRAPHS IN PURGATORY

My work has dealt with the multiple razor-sharp elements of photography as a specific form of experience, which tests our ability to capture truth and memory. A crucial aspect has been the materiality of the image: What are the images made of? What would be the zero degree of photographic writing? 

When the images dematerialise, I try to help save the ruins of that photographic substance to which we attributed the alchemical power of retaining life while conjuring death. In many recent projects, I visited archives and historical collections to search for traumatic images, ill, damaged photographs, photographs that suffer some type of disorder that disturbs their document function and makes them unable to continue “inhabiting” the archive. What happens, we can ask ourselves then, when a photograph is "released from its soul"? What remains when a photograph no longer points out a reality out of itself and only the substrate, the residue, just a few spots of light-sensitive chemicals remain? At that moment, the photograph becomes a ghost. In certain beliefs, ghosts are souls that cannot be recovered for the reincarnation cycle because they still have some kind of unfinished mission. Perhaps these photographic phantasmagoria are still wandering through purgatory because of their unfinished work, which was to hold onto what has disappeared.