Background
Joan Fontcuberta was born in 1955 in Barcelona, Spain.
Joan Fontcuberta was born in 1955 in Barcelona, Spain.
He was the self-taught photographer graduated from the Faculty of Communications, University of Barcelona, in 1977, having studied journalism and advertising.
Currently a teacher at his alma mater's Faculty of Fine Arts and at the Center for Image Studies in Barcelona (since 1978), he also directs a weekly photography section in Spain's largest newspaper, La Vanguardia (since 1979). From 1977 to 1978 Fontcuberta wrote a weekly column on photography in the Barcelona newspaper El Correo Catalan and taught photography at the Department of Technology, Faculty of Communications, Barcelona. He has been a freelance photographer since 1976.
Fontcuberta founded the Alabem Group of Spanish creative photographers in 1976.
Using black-and-white and selenium-toned prints, Fontcuberta describes his work as "anti-documentalistic aesthetics.'' He says, "Not worried about objects by themselves, I try to find the absurd between objects' relations."