Exercise: Joan Fontcuberta-Sputnic.

Exercise: Joan Fontcuberta-Sputnic.

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. or so goes the old adage.  In the last post I quoted Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, on truth.  He is worth quoting again.  He said "Truth is whatever people will believe." 

The book Sputnic by Joan Fontcuberta is the proof of this . Not only did Fontcuberta use a Russian form of his own name as the eponymous hero but also used his own face.  At the Madrid Exhibition the catalog had, 'it's all fiction', on the endpapers and on the official web site the words ,'PURE FICTION', were displayed on every page.  

Despite this the Mexican magazine Luna Cornea seems to have taken the story as true, and the Soviet government got very upset by the story as it was insulting to Russia's glorious past.

There is something honest and real about black and white images that we tend not to challenge.  The use here of black and white added to the reality of the pictures and therefor the story.  Some viewers seeing the images clearly failed to see through the deception.  

In his book Fauna Fontcuberta published doctored images purporting to be of real animals.  Among them were twelve legged snakes, quadrupeds with wings and monkeys with horns.  When first published in 1988 Fontcuberto reported that opinion went, "from people who understand that it is a farce and appreciate the satire and the humour 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."

These books are a nice example of the gullibility of people.  It puts a question mark on believing ones own eyes, or taking for granted the truth of an image.  People see what they want to see; the naive believe what they see, the sceptics disbelieves what they sees, while the bigots will see only what their prejudice allows them to see.

As we have seen from last few exercises, truth of a photograph lies very much within the mind of the viewer.  He will believe what he wants to believe.

Ref: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Fontcuberta#Fauna_.281987.29
[Accessed: 4th. November 2015].