Googlegram: Niépce,

2005, printed 2013

A meditation on the itinerancy of images, this work points to every photograph’s potential for circulation and transformation, from the very first photograph to those reproduced, uploaded, and downloaded on the Internet today. Fontcuberta created this image by typing the words photo and foto into a Google image search and processing ten thousand results through photomosaic software to recreate the earliest known photograph—Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s <em>View from the Window at Le Gras</em> (about 1826)—as a composite. Produced via a database of information that is constantly in flux, Googlegram: Niépce suggests that when we read an image we must read not only what is readily visible in it but also what lies beneath the image’s surface. Every image is already a kind of archive, the trace of multiple memories.