Explores the photography of Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Tàpies as revealed in the series The Artist and the Photograph originally exhibited in Barcelona, Spain.

Joan Fontcuberta tries to put the "real" into Dalí's Surrealism. In this first major monograph to be published in the United States by one of Spain's most prominent and innovative artists, Fontcuberta subjects various imaginative landscapes--among them ones by Cézanne, Turner and Weston in addition to Dalí, as well as photographs of his own body--to the manipulation of landscape-rendering software originally designed for the military and scientific communities. The limited visual vocabulary of the programs translates contours (like floppy clocks) into natural elements such as hills, rivers, clouds and the like. The result, actually, looks far from real. As Fontcuberta says, "In a typically surrealistic caper, introducing the critical-paranoid method in the technological heart of the computer, Dalí's dreams become equally impossible landscapes." And, he might have added, gorgeous black-and-white ones.

The first English translation of a renowned collection of essays by Joan Fontcuberta, in which he considers the technological shift that photography has undergone in recent years. Fontcuberta uses the motif of Pandora's box to conceptualise the capricious nature of photography, and its fickle relationship to truth - employing the Greek myth concerning a large jar containing myriad forms of human unhappiness, or blessings, depending on the version you read. As Pandora's camera, digital technology spells calamity to some and liberation to others; it is blamed for irretrievably discrediting veracity, but at the same time it introduces a new degree of truth. Fontcuberta examines the new principles that have arisen within the digital ecosystem, in critical reflections inspired by the hope that still remains in the notion of a postmodern Pandora's camera - one that might not only describe our environment, but also bring transparency to it.

Featuring such established and emerging photographers as Joan Fontcuberta, Hubertus von Ameluxen, Daniel Girardin, Andr Gunthert, Ian Jeffrey, Mounira Khemir, Boris Kossoy, Andrea Kunnard, Vincent Lavoie, Joan Warnaco, Jos Antonio Navarrete, Bernardo Riego, Teresa Siza, Marie Loup Sougez, Johan Swinnen, Carmelo Vega, and Henning Steen Wettendorff, Photography: Crisis in History showcases work that challenges the way in which we have normally understood the medium of photography. At a time when the photographic image is omnipresent--in our daily environment as it is in art--the historical and aesthetic models used to interpret photography are in a state of crisis. Here an international group of historians and critics--as well as the artists mentioned above--revise the dominant assumptions on which our knowledge and appreciation of the history of photography have been based, and set out a number of possible alternatives. Featuring a selection of the best in contemporary international photography, as well as sixteen revealing and concise essays exploring the state of the historical question in photography, Photography: Crisis in History is an exhilarating artistic and art-historical document.

This volume brings together three projects by Joan Fontcuberta, projects that use photography as a way of seeing within the context of contemporary art. In this work, paradox, ambiguity, trompe-l'oeil and the investigation of the photographic trace form the common nexus.

"This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition The Itinerant Languages of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, September 7, 2013-January 19, 2014"--Title page verso.