Joan Fontcuberta | Barcelona,1956. Lives in Barcelona.

Fontcuberta has a degree in Information Sciences, and is involved in the field of photography as a creator, historian, theoretician, curator and teacher. He began to show in 1974 in photography galleries in Barcelona and Madrid, and his work is now in important museum collections in Europe and the United States. In 1998 he received the Spanish National Photography Prize. Through various projects since 1982 –such as "Herbarium", "Fauna secreta" (done with Pere Formiguera), "Moby Dick" and "Sputnik"– he has combined visual and literary references to fabricate fictions, X-files, and simulacra "that parody the exhibition rhetoric of museums and scientific institutions, related to fields like botany, zoology, history, anthropology or astronomy". He thus questions the evidence and objectivity of the photographic act as an expression of institutional and media authority. Fontcuberta claims to belong to "the race of skeptics", and with his captivating falsifications he encourages us to "learn to live in simulation".