Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera. Fauna Secreta. Madrid [Barcelona]: Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 1989.
 
Museum catalogue for Fontcuberta and Formiguera's whimsical exhibition, supposedly documenting the elusive Dr Ameisenhaufen's "veritable bestiary of strangely mutated beasts" (Parr & Badger).
 
Conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta has achieved celebrated success (Roth, 262) in challenging the authority of the photographic medium with a sceptical, culturally diverse eye (Parr & Badger II: 68). Fauna Secreta, a revision of the earlier Fauna (1988), displays the same playfulness, with contradiction, play, conflict and possibility forming the territory of his work (Sala, 51).
 
Here, Fontcuberta and Formiguera further document the supposed discovery in Glasgow of German scientist Dr Peter Ameisenhaufen's archive. They offer evidence of bizarrely mutated animals in remote parts of the world so convincingly that viewers almost believe it even while enjoying the joke (Parr & Badger II: 68). Their fictions effectively, and often hilariously, question photographic credibility (Roth, 262). This is more than parody: its convincing presentation gives the photographs both aesthetic interest and critical seriousness (Parr & Badger II: 68). Fontcuberta warns: "There are mirrors whose miracle is not truth, but fantasy, illusion."
 
Scarce catalogue of the travelling Fauna Secreta exhibition, accompanying its March–June presentation at Madrid's Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. Text in Spanish with an English appendix. Roth, 265. See The Open Book, 342.
 
A good copy.