[What the Fucking Fuck!]
This work brings together more than 1,800 photos selected by Jean-Marie Donat from his wanderings on the Internet since 2016. On social networks and the websites they come from, the expression WTF! (What the Fuck!) serves to point out the astonishment caused by these types of images that accumulate on the Internet and are consumed by users insensitive to even the most shocking content. In the words of its author, the project is a criticism of the obsession with generating “extraordinary” content, which is seen, consumed and shared by millions of people, but which disappears after a few days.
Jean-Marie Donat preserves these originally ephemeral images as a gesture of defiance in the face of what he considers “a web race to nowhere.” When transferred to paper, in a sequence of five unique, numbered-edition books –What the Fuck!, What the Mega Fuck!, What the Super Mega Fuck!, What the Giga Super Mega Fuck! and What the Final Fuck!– he tries to take them out of the immateriality of the internet and turn them into a lasting portrait of contemporary humanity.
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Born in 1962 in Paris, Jean-Marie Donat is an iconographic artist and publisher. The son of a Parisian printer, Jean-Marie Donat studied Graphic Design at the Lycée Corvisart in the Graphic Arts department. For more than 35 years, he has been building up a vast collection of photographs he has found at flea markets and fairs. His collection spans nearly a century of photographic history (1880-1980) and includes more than 40,000 photographs, Ektachromes and negatives from around the world. A significant part of the collection consists of vernacular and anonymous images, chosen for the cultural and social testimony they convey. His collection has been the subject of several exhibitions, including Les Rencontres d’Arles (2015), the Hamburg Triennale (2018), the Lianzhou Museum of Photography in China (2019) and Image Vevey (2020).
