Arles 2025 : Joan Fontcuberta : L’Œil et l’Index

The pointing gesture is the perfect embodiment of photography’s role as a document: an injunction to look at this. In this textual and visual essay, artist Joan Fontcuberta uses the index finger as the starting point for a humorous reflection on photography’s relationship to reality. He refutes, while also drawing inspiration from it, Roland Barthes’ proposition that each photograph tells us “this was.”

Is the camera a witness to reality or a performance, as shown in the reproduced images from the Mexican crime newspaper Alerta! (active in the 1960s and 1980s), which feature a pointing finger? These existential questions are now amplified by the emergence of generative AI and extend Joan Fontcuberta’s reflections, which began with Manifesto for a Post-Photography, published by Actes Sud in 2022.