BERLIN.- The exhibition Joan Fontcuberta: What Darwin Missed presents a new series of around forty works specially conceived for the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung by internationally recognized Catalan photographer, curator, essayist, and lecturer Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955). The artist is renowned for his playful way of engaging audiences but also addressing the boundaries between reality and fiction. His works reflect on the role of photography in representing reality and frequently deal critically—but always humorously and provocatively—with the image in scientific disciplines such as botany or zoology.

For the current exhibition, Fontcuberta engaged intensively with the foundation’s archive and resumed a research project Alfred Ehrhardt had started in 1938 for the Natural History Museum in Hamburg but was unable to complete due to historical circumstances.

This history can be briefly outlined as follows: in 1938, to commemorate the publishing of Charles Darwin’s The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842, Alfred Ehrhardt was commissioned by the Hamburg Natural History Museum to photograph its collection of corals. Eight of these photographs will be presented in the exhibition, supplemented by Ehrhardt’s award-winning 1964 film Korallen – Skulpturen der Meere (Corals—Sculptures of the Seas), which can be regarded as a later fulfillment of his commission. Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and the Valdivia deep-sea expedition, he was to accompany the head of the coral collection to locate a highly specialized species of coral on the Galapagos and Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Due to the outbreak of the Second World War, neither the expedition nor the publication were realized. In 1943, the Hamburg Natural History Museum and its coral collection were completely destroyed in a conflagration.

Joan Fontcuberta has worked artistically with unusual and scientific phenomena since the 1980s. Ehrhardt’s coral photographs fascinated him in part because these unusual zoological organisms were mistakenly thought to be a hybrid species of plant and mineral kingdoms. But he was particularly intrigued by the idea of undertaking the never-realized expedition and searching for the coral species Darwin had missed.

Fontcuberta embarked on the quest and found what he was looking for: his photographs were taken in these remote locations and in the collections of European natural history museums (Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Bologna, Granollers). A wide variety of corals are represented, including a newly discovered species called Cryptocnidaria, which can adapt to extreme environmental conditions such as very high or low temperatures, unusual pH values, or high-water pressure in the deep sea. Scientists speculate that abnormal genetic effects possibly caused by chemicals or radioactivity gave rise to Cryptocnidaria. The speed and complexity of these adaptations present a challenge to Darwin’s evolutionary model asserting that changes develop gradually over many generations and through random mutations and natural selection.

Behind the exquisite elegance of nature’s forms, seen through the lens of New Objectivity and scientific photography, Fontcuberta’s discovery not only poses a significant challenge to Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also prompts viewers to take a closer look. The research quest serves as the narrative starting point out of which the exhibition evolves, one based entirely on the interrelationship between fact and speculation, science and art—not everything the eye sees should be accepted uncritically as truth, and not everything that claims to be scientific is necessarily correct. In the exhibition, Fontcuberta’s coral photographs form a dialogue with original finds from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. The natural history exhibits of corals take on a new character via the photographs the artist has created especially for this exhibition.

Fontcuberta’s images attest to the need to rethink our approaches to understanding the origins and diversity of life on Earth. Following Darwin’s example, he argues for the necessity of skepticism and shows that even the most accepted theories must always be questioned because science is nothing more than a series of provisional truths.

Above all, however, he encourages us not to succumb to the persuasive illusion of images.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Joan Fontcuberta, Rosa Russo, and Christiane Stahl, 112 pages, 60 illustrations, Kominek Verlag, 2024.

Organized in collaboration with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.