Joan Fontcuberta

The premise was that Fontcuberta and Formiguera discovered the long-lost archives of German zoologist Dr. Peter Ameisenhaufen, who was born in 1895 and who disappeared mysteriously in 1955.

Ameisenhaufen had catalogued a number of unusual animals; for example, Cercopithecus icarocornu resembles a monkey with a unicorn-like horn on its head and wings; and Solenoglypha polipodida resembles a snake with 12 feet.

Joan Fontcuberta (born 24 February 1955) is a Spanish conceptual artist and photographer whose best-known works, such as Fauna and Sputnik, examine the truthfulness of photography.

In addition, he is a writer, editor, teacher, and curator.

Fontcuberta was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Soyuz 1, an actual Soviet space mission in 1967, had ended with the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov when the spacecraft crashed on landing.

He received a degree in communications from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1977.

He worked in advertising in his early career, and his family had also worked in advertising.

From 1979 to 1986 he was a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, after which he earned a living through his art.

In 1980 he co-founded the Spanish/English visual arts journal PhotoVision, and he is still Editor in Chief.

A review of the exhibition as presented in 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art noted that the evidence presented for the existence of the animals included "photographs... both in their natural habitats and in laboratory situations; detailed field notes, both in the original German and English translations; an occasional skeletal X-ray or dissection drawing; two or three tapes of the animals' cries, and in one case, an actual stuffed specimen".

Furthermore, a video displayed interviews in which various people discussed Ameisenhaufen's life.

The exhibition was shown in England, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada and the United States.

The fake animals displayed at the exhibitions varied according to the "legends, traditions, and superstitions" of the place hosting the exhibition.

Among other clues suggesting that the exhibition was a hoax, "Formiguera" and "Ameisenhaufen" both mean "anthill," and the name of "Hans von Kubert" (Ameisenhaufen's research assistant) sounds like "Joan Fontcuberta."

Fontcuberta reported that responses to the exhibition ranged "from people who understand that it is a farce and appreciate the satire and the humor of it, to people who understand it's a farce and are angry at you for trying to fool them, to people who believe it and are angry, to people who believe it and are delighted."

He said in another interview that during the 1989 exhibition in the Barcelona Museum of Natural Science, "30% of the visitors aged 20 to 30, with university training, believed that some of our animals could have existed."

In this series, "the images of the cosmos are strewn with a fine stardust", but "what they actually record is dust, crushed insects and other debris that accumulated on the windshield of Mr. Fontcuberta's car."

The photographs were created "by applying sheets of 8-by-10-inch film directly to the glass and shining a light through, creating photograms, which were then made into Cibachrome prints."

In this series, Fontcuberta "imagine[d] and realize[d] photographic works by the four greatest Spanish artists of the twentieth century, namely Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Antoni Tàpies."

He mixed fact (e.g., that Picasso and André Villers collaborated on a series of lithographs called "Diurnes") with fiction (e.g., that a researcher recently found discarded images from the series).

The purpose of this series was to explore how curators and museums influence the public's perception of art.

For this project, Fontcuberta fabricated evidence that the Soyuz 2 spacecraft was crewed by cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov.

Since 1993 Fontcuberta has been a professor of audiovisual communication at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Among other awards, he was named an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 1994.

His curatorial experience includes serving as the artistic director of the 1996 Rencontres d'Arles, an international photography festival.

Among other teaching appointments, he was visiting lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in 2003.

He exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles, France, in 2005 and 2009.

He says that the missing finger makes him a terrible photographer, although in 2013 he won the Hasselblad International Award in Photography.

Fontcuberta describes himself as "self-taught in photography" and considers himself "a conceptual artist using photography."

He states that the propaganda and dictatorship of Spain under Franco in his first 20 years led him to be skeptical about authority, which is reflected in his art.

His background in communications and advertising led him to contemplate the relationship between photography and truth, and Fontcuberta believes that humor is an important component of his work.

His art has been described as "postmodern."

Fontcuberta's works are held in the permanent collections of many museums, such as Art Institute of Chicago; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; George Eastman House, Rochester; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Solo exhibitions of single series of Fontcuberta's works include the following (with earliest known year of exhibition in parentheses ):

In this series, Fontcuberta "arranged inanimate objects such as electrical cord, plastic, a shaving brush or a rubber hose into what appear to be exotic plants", thereby creating "pseudoplants".

The black and white still-life photographs of these constructions were "drily classified in Latin" and thereby resembled the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt.

The photographs were exhibited in Belgium, the United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Canada, and France.

Also known as "Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna" or "Secret Fauna", Fontcuberta created this series in collaboration with the writer and photographer Pere Formiguera.

One of his fingers is missing as a result, he said in a 2014 interview, to a home-made bomb blowing up in his hand.