At first glance, it may seem that a bathtub has little to do with a village devastated by an earthquake in Sicily, or a washbasin with two Nobel Prize winners, but when Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó get together, anything can happen. And that is what those attending the unique "Art meets Architecture" event in Barcelona organized by Laufen, the Swiss brand of Premium bathroom products, were able to see for themselves.
Laufen has been promoting encounters between design, art, and architecture for several years; it has chosen some of the most outstanding designers and artists in the sector to open a dialogue between the sobriety of the utilitarian and the poetry of exquisite, almost architectural forms.
In this last meeting, Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó, two great photographers, true conjurers of the image and masters of irony, opened a dialogue between architecture and art in which they reviewed their respective careers dominated by games of perception, each from their particular way of understanding artistic practice.
Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó at Art meets Architecture. Photograph by Roger Castello.
Joan Fontcuberta, the winner of the Hasselblad International Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of photography, has based much of his work on questioning the veracity of photography. His most popular projects deal with verisimilitude, playing with the confusion between reality and fiction, always with a large dose of humor. Among his latest projects stand out the large compositions made with photoceramics, such as the Gibellina Selfie project, a photomural made from the self-portraits of the inhabitants of the Sicilian town of Gibellina, which in 1968 was devastated by a devastating earthquake of great magnitude; or the ongoing project on miniature cities, in which images of monuments and buildings at a scale of 1:20 to 1:50, apparently so real, are superimposed with another layer of reality, barely glimpsed thanks to some minimal detail. In his photos, nothing is what it seems.
Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó at Art meets Architecture. Photograph by Roger Castello.
For his part, many of Jordi Bernadó's photographic works are linked to architecture and landscape. His images portray buildings, interiors, or landscapes that he turns into theatrical scenographies, such as the One Way project, a series of portraits in which, precisely, what do not appear are the faces of the protagonists (among them those of two Nobel Prize winners, a well-known filmmaker and a renowned biologist), photographed with their backs turned and from a great distance. These photos are full of narrative, but also of fiction and a great deal of irony. His main interest is to explore the different layers of photographic language because photography says what it says, but it can also say many other things.
Throughout the debate, Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó each explained the value they give to images and the place they occupy in the world. For Fontcuberta, what interests him most is to generate doubt in the viewer, to set himself up as a kind of advocate of doubt, since he believes that we have excessive blind trust in images. He advocates for an emancipated spectator, in the words of Jacques Rancière, an attentive spectator who is capable of digging beyond appearances and going to the zero degrees of visual language. Neither words nor images mean anything by themselves, according to Fontcuberta, but depend on a certain context, a certain intention, a certain cultural environment that makes these images understandable. Photographs, by nature, are polysemic, they mean many things. For this reason, we should avoid falling into dogma, into credulity, and adopt a certain skepticism, a certain distrust towards what we see. And he amply demonstrates this with his initial projects, such as Constelaciones, a series of evocative photographs of a starry sky that turn out to be, in reality, negative photographs of mosquitoes squashed on the windshield of a car.
Bernadó, on the other hand, prefers that the photograph becomes a memorable moment, both for the photographer and the photographed, that the images want to say something more than what is seen with the naked eye. In this sense runs one of his most recent projects, Writing West, a journey from coast to coast of the United States marked by the promise of a name on the map: from Jupiter (Florida) to Paradise (California), through Venus (Florida), Paris (Texas), Paradox (Texas), or Love (also in Texas), among many others, places where this promise contrasts with reality. In the case of architectural photography commissions, Bernadó defends a new way of fulfilling that commission: it is no longer enough to document a building, but photography can also incite surprise, provoke something more than a mere documentary fact.
A subject, architectural photography, that Joan Fontcuberta also takes advantage of to wonder about all those buildings that have been conceived thinking that, once finished, they will give good images reproduced in specialized magazines, designed to be photogenic.
Faced with the always controversial question of whether or not there is an excess of images in our society, both Fontcuberta and Bernadó are, on the one hand, in favor of this democratization of photography, previously reserved only for professionals, which has become a universal language. On the other hand, an avalanche of images like the one we have today can be worrying insofar as they substitute reality and distance us from what is tangible, from what is true, to supplant it for fiction that alienates us.
This dialogue between two greats of photography and art, also framed in the field of architecture, is another step in Laufen's continued collaboration with the world of culture, architecture, design, and art. Because such collaborations make innovation in the industry possible. Laufen's commitment is to continue betting on this type of activities from which everyone; both the artists themselves, as well as the public, mutually benefit from the exchange of ideas and reflections. So yes, we can affirm that two Nobel Prizes can be related to a sink, and a city devastated by an earthquake to a bathtub.
Laufen has been promoting encounters between design, art, and architecture for several years; it has chosen some of the most outstanding designers and artists in the sector to open a dialogue between the sobriety of the utilitarian and the poetry of exquisite, almost architectural forms.
In this last meeting, Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó, two great photographers, true conjurers of the image and masters of irony, opened a dialogue between architecture and art in which they reviewed their respective careers dominated by games of perception, each from their particular way of understanding artistic practice.
Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó at Art meets Architecture. Photograph by Roger Castello.
Joan Fontcuberta, the winner of the Hasselblad International Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of photography, has based much of his work on questioning the veracity of photography. His most popular projects deal with verisimilitude, playing with the confusion between reality and fiction, always with a large dose of humor. Among his latest projects stand out the large compositions made with photoceramics, such as the Gibellina Selfie project, a photomural made from the self-portraits of the inhabitants of the Sicilian town of Gibellina, which in 1968 was devastated by a devastating earthquake of great magnitude; or the ongoing project on miniature cities, in which images of monuments and buildings at a scale of 1:20 to 1:50, apparently so real, are superimposed with another layer of reality, barely glimpsed thanks to some minimal detail. In his photos, nothing is what it seems.
Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó at Art meets Architecture. Photograph by Roger Castello.
For his part, many of Jordi Bernadó's photographic works are linked to architecture and landscape. His images portray buildings, interiors, or landscapes that he turns into theatrical scenographies, such as the One Way project, a series of portraits in which, precisely, what do not appear are the faces of the protagonists (among them those of two Nobel Prize winners, a well-known filmmaker and a renowned biologist), photographed with their backs turned and from a great distance. These photos are full of narrative, but also of fiction and a great deal of irony. His main interest is to explore the different layers of photographic language because photography says what it says, but it can also say many other things.
Throughout the debate, Joan Fontcuberta and Jordi Bernadó each explained the value they give to images and the place they occupy in the world. For Fontcuberta, what interests him most is to generate doubt in the viewer, to set himself up as a kind of advocate of doubt, since he believes that we have excessive blind trust in images. He advocates for an emancipated spectator, in the words of Jacques Rancière, an attentive spectator who is capable of digging beyond appearances and going to the zero degrees of visual language. Neither words nor images mean anything by themselves, according to Fontcuberta, but depend on a certain context, a certain intention, a certain cultural environment that makes these images understandable. Photographs, by nature, are polysemic, they mean many things. For this reason, we should avoid falling into dogma, into credulity, and adopt a certain skepticism, a certain distrust towards what we see. And he amply demonstrates this with his initial projects, such as Constelaciones, a series of evocative photographs of a starry sky that turn out to be, in reality, negative photographs of mosquitoes squashed on the windshield of a car.
Bernadó, on the other hand, prefers that the photograph becomes a memorable moment, both for the photographer and the photographed, that the images want to say something more than what is seen with the naked eye. In this sense runs one of his most recent projects, Writing West, a journey from coast to coast of the United States marked by the promise of a name on the map: from Jupiter (Florida) to Paradise (California), through Venus (Florida), Paris (Texas), Paradox (Texas), or Love (also in Texas), among many others, places where this promise contrasts with reality. In the case of architectural photography commissions, Bernadó defends a new way of fulfilling that commission: it is no longer enough to document a building, but photography can also incite surprise, provoke something more than a mere documentary fact.
A subject, architectural photography, that Joan Fontcuberta also takes advantage of to wonder about all those buildings that have been conceived thinking that, once finished, they will give good images reproduced in specialized magazines, designed to be photogenic.
Faced with the always controversial question of whether or not there is an excess of images in our society, both Fontcuberta and Bernadó are, on the one hand, in favor of this democratization of photography, previously reserved only for professionals, which has become a universal language. On the other hand, an avalanche of images like the one we have today can be worrying insofar as they substitute reality and distance us from what is tangible, from what is true, to supplant it for fiction that alienates us.
This dialogue between two greats of photography and art, also framed in the field of architecture, is another step in Laufen's continued collaboration with the world of culture, architecture, design, and art. Because such collaborations make innovation in the industry possible. Laufen's commitment is to continue betting on this type of activities from which everyone; both the artists themselves, as well as the public, mutually benefit from the exchange of ideas and reflections. So yes, we can affirm that two Nobel Prizes can be related to a sink, and a city devastated by an earthquake to a bathtub.
