Joan Fontcuberta tries to put the "real" in 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 Cezanne, 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.

Dne of Spain's most prominent and innova-tive artists, Joan Fontcuberta is best known for exploring the interstices between art.sclence, and illusion. Where science reaches its limits in his works, the imagination finds a creative space in which to flourish. In Land-scapes without Memory, Fontcuberta has co-opted a piece of computer software origi-nally designed for military or scientific use in rendering three-dimensional images of landscapes. The software enables the user to build photo-realistic models based on information scanned from two-dimensional sources. With this widely available "freeware"as his starting point, Fontcuberta has created the two series that constitute Landscapes without Memory. In Landscapes of Landscapes Fontcuberta uses classic landscape paintings by masters such as Cezanne, Rousseau, and Dali as his source material. In Bodyscapes, he uses photographs of his own body, scanning them into the software program to create highly baroque, three-dimensional landscape

As Geoffrey Batchen writes in his introductory essay, "In Fontcuberta's hands,photography has become a philosophical activity, not a pictorial one. He asks us to think as much as to look. And in this case we are supposed to be thinking about photography and landscape, perhaps even about the new landscape of photography."

LANDSCAPES WITHOUT MEMORY