Joan Fontcuberta’s *The Photography of Nature & The Nature of Photography*, published by MACK in 2013, gathers six major series in a 224-page survey published in connection with the photographer’s receipt of the 2013 Hasselblad Award. Rather than treating nature as a neutral subject, Fontcuberta uses botanical specimens, biological discoveries, stellar matter, space history, fossils and digitally generated landscapes to examine how photographic evidence is made persuasive.

The book brings together *Herbarium* (1984), *Fauna* (1987), *Constellations* (1993), *Sputnik* (1997), *Sirens* (2000) and *Orogenesis* (2002). Across these projects, fabricated findings are presented with the visual and documentary codes of scientific research, investigation and reportage. The images are carefully constructed, but they are also threaded with clues, inconsistencies and recurring disguises—Fontcuberta appears under identities including Hans von Kubert and Joan Fontana. The resulting tension is central to the work: photography can appear truthful not because it is transparent, but because its forms of authority are so familiar and seductive.

The volume is consequently both a survey of Fontcuberta’s practice and an inquiry into the medium itself. Its distinctive character lies in the way humour, fantasy and methodological precision operate together; the apparent subject may be a species, a fossil or a star field, while the deeper subject is the viewer’s readiness to believe. A separate essay section, with texts by Geoffrey Batchen and Jorge Wagensberg, examines the myths constructed across the series and extends the book’s movement between image, fiction and critical reflection.

For collectors, this is a significant sustained account of Fontcuberta’s work at a moment formally associated with international recognition. Its value as a book lies not simply in reproducing individual projects, but in placing six interconnected investigations into one designed sequence, allowing the recurring questions about photographic authority, scientific storytelling and representation to accumulate across the volume. The publisher specifies a hardcover edition with 222 plates.