Barcelona, 1969
Colita
PHOTOS
Showing posts with label Spanish photographers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spanish photographers. Show all posts
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Thursday, September 22, 2022
Daido Moriyama / Fish Head
UNTITLED (FISH HEAD) BY DAIDO MORIYAMA (1978)
☛ Tepper Takayama Fine Arts: Untitled (Fish Head) by Daido Moriyama, Tsugaru Straits, gelatin silver print on fibre paper, 11″ x 14″, 1978. Hi-res reproduction retrieved from Foam. © Daido MoriyamaThis image is also reproduced in the catalog assembled on behalf of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain: Daido Moriyama, photographs by Daido Moriyama, text by Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama, London: Thames & Hudson 2003, p. 34. The hi-res reproduction shown above was scanned from this book where the head is shown facing down. I did however kept the orientation shown over at the Tepper Takayama Fine Arts website, with the head facing right.
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Spanish Photographers / Ramón Masats
| Moral de Calatrava |
Spanish Photographers
Ramón Masats
Behind the bullfighters: Ramón Masats' unflinching look at 1950s Spain – in pictures
‘Masats, a man of few words, phlegmatic and stubborn in his convictions, coherent in his eye-heart connection, created a photographic legacy that is essential to understanding the development of graphic reporting in Spain.’
| Casa de Campo, Madrid, 1959 |
‘Masats was determined to interpret the tourist cliches from a local vantage point. Silent irony to counter the censors.’
| Mercado de San Antonio, Barcelona, 1955 |
San Antonio Market
‘Masats worked on assignments for Mundo Hispánico, Gaceta Ilustrada and the new Ministry of Information and Tourism. He poured all his photographic intensity into investigating what he called his homeland’s cultural cliches, such as popular rites and festivals, religious or folkloric. It was a different way of telling a story.’
| Cádiz, 1963 |
‘The political regime’s secrecy and international obstinacy nurtured a view of Spain from the outside as an exotic country in thrall to a dictatorship where tourists would find exuberant landscapes brimming with Gypsies and bandits, bulls and bullfighters, guitarists and flamenco dancers, beaches and historical monuments under the sun at rock-bottom prices.’
| Exportur, Madrid, 1965 |
‘Halfway through the 1950s, Ramón appeared in Madrid. He came from his birthplace, Catalonia, to carve a niche for himself as a professional photographer.’
| Subasta benéfica. Bobby Deglané, Madrid, 1960 |
Charitable Audicion / Bobby Deglané in the Foreground
‘Travelling around a bleak, drooping Spain in the 50s was both a challenge and an opportunity for photography. The official tourist propaganda glorified the monumental stone structures while ignoring the common folk, and reporting, the new language to tell what the world was like, chose the human figure as the essential core of the story.’
| Duke of Windsor Partyu in Antonio el Bailarín's House Madrid, 1961 |
‘In the second half of the 50s and throughout the 60s, a spirit of openness flourished in Spain, tentatively at first, unstoppably later, unleashed by the influence of tourism and the urgent need to emerge from the isolation of the Franco dictatorship, which had a political, social and economic stranglehold on the country.’
| Neutral Corner II, Madrid, 1962 |
| Sanfermines, Pamplona, 1960 |
| Tomelloso, Ciudad Real, 1960 |
| Arcos de la Frontera, Cádiz, 1962 |
| Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, 1963 |
Grape Harvest
‘This exhibition captures scenes from that time through the ironic, carefree, direct eye of the photographer.’
| Cursillos de cristiandad, Toledo, 1957 Courses in Christianity |
| Visita del presidente Eisenhower, Madrid, 1959 Visit by President Eisenhower |
| Photo by Ramón Masats |
| Ibrique, Cádiz, 1957 |
| Tierra de Campos, 1962 |
| Barrio de la Concepción, Madrid |
| Seminario. Madrid, 1960 |
Seminary
The Ramón Masats exhibition, Visit Spain, is at PhotoEspaña 2020 until 10 October. The book is published by La Fábrica
The Ramón Masats exhibition, Visit Spain, is at PhotoEspaña 2020 until 10 October. The book is published by La Fábrica
Monday, January 15, 2018
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Alberto García-Alix's best photograph / Self-portrait in a dress made by Elvis
| ‘I’ve taken pictures of myself naked and even masturbating – I have no shame’ … García-Alix. Photograph: Alberto García-Alix |
Alberto García-Alix's best photograph: self-portrait in a dress made by Elvis
‘Things weren’t good. My liver was in trouble. I’d been told the drugs had to stop’
Interview by Sam Jones
Wednesday 23 August 2017 12.41 BST
I
had a friend called Elvis who made really beautiful knitted clothes. I’d known her since the end of the 1970s, when Spain had just been freed from Francoism and all the drugs began. She had a band and she was really wild – a true character.
Elvis and I ran into each other again in 1999 or 2000 and I said I would shoot her clothes, which were modelled by friends as there wasn’t much money about. Then I decided to put some of them on and take a picture of myself. I was the only man wearing them. I made up my eyes but I didn’t do my hair – and I had a lot more back then. The power in this picture comes from my hands: they’re clenched and that brings a certain violence.
My face is showing no emotion – since that would make it seem staged. I don’t like dramatising faces: I don’t like to weigh down the mask of the face with smiles or whatever. I can see past the clothes and see myself straight away. It’s one of my best self-portraits and I’ve done hundreds. I’ve taken pictures of myself naked or even masturbating. When it comes to my own camera, I have no shame whatsoever.
I started off by taking self-portraits in 1976: it was how I learned to take photographs. At first there was something playful and flirtatious about it, but by the 1990s it had become something more profound – it was an exercise in searching for one’s self. And if I was going to accept myself, a degree of honesty and understanding was required.
Like everyone, I’m a product of my era. I left home when I was 20, in 1976. I was influenced by all the ideas of my time. We nourished ourselves on American counterculture, on British groups, on sexual liberation.
The years 1976 to 1979 were the years of compulsion, agitation, provocation and performance. As with all young people, it was about breaking the conventions. We were keen to move past Francoism and see all of Spain change.
I see other things when I look at the photo now. I see myself back in that moment when things weren’t going well for me. They told me my liver was in trouble; that I had hepatitis C. They told me that I had to give up all the drugs. I took drugs from 1976 to 2002: heroin, a lot of cocaine, I smoked a lot of joints and I drank. A proper addict. Now I just smoke joints.
I started interferon treatment, which was unbelievably tough and had a lot of side-effects. It wasn’t a very pleasant time but the tensest times can be the most creative.
This photo has become iconic and gone around the world: China, Germany, Buenos Aires, Paris… People seem to like the strength of it. In fact, I think people like it more than I do.
- Alberto García-Alix is curating six shows at this year’s PhotoEspaña festival
Alberto García-Alix’s CV
Born: 22 March 1956, Léon, Spain.
Trained: Studied law but self-taught as a photographer.
Influences: “Visits to the Prado with my mother, where I learned composition; the writers Céline, Stendhal, Balzac and Conrad.”
High point: “I feel calm and free when I’m on my motorbike – that’s when I’m happiest. All the rest is just work.”
Low point: “Maybe it was the interferon treatment. But I had to do it to save my life.”
Top tip: “I’m not the right kind of person to give advice, but I know it’s my childlike soul that’s saved me.”
THE GUARDIAN
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Colita / National Arts Prize winners say “no, thank you” to protest government cuts
Photographer ‘Colita,’ in a photo from 2009.CHEMA MOYA (EFE)
National Arts Prize winners say “no, thank you” to protest government cuts
Photographer and musician decline awards to highlight “shameful” state of culture sector
Blanca Cia
Barcelona, November 12, 2014
Two winners of this year’s Spanish National Arts Prizes have turned down their awards, accusing the government of systematically damaging the sector.
Photographer Isabel Steva i Hernández, better known as Colita, along with musician Jordi Savall, have both rejected their €30,000 prizes, which the government awards each year to leading figures from a range of artistic endeavors. They have both published open letters to Arts, Education, and Sports Minister José Ignacio Wert outlining their unhappiness with government cuts and taxes that have hit the arts and entertainment sectors hard.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Obituaries / Oriol Maspons / A fond farewell to Spain’s shooting star
Writers Jaime Gil de Biedma, José Agustin, Goytisolo, Carlos Barral and José María Castellet in 1961
Photo by ORIOL MASPONS
OBITUARY
A fond farewell to Spain’s shooting star
Oriol Maspons, who revolutionized Spanish photography in the 1950s, has died at the age of 84
Laura Terré
August 14, 2013
Oriol Maspons would need no introduction if photography was considered in the same way that, for instance, film or literature were considered in this country. Maspons, who died on Monday in Barcelona at the age of 84, was not only an excellent practitioner, but also the most important, revitalizing and experimental theorist of his age, whose ideas nourished a whole generation of photographers: the so-called golden generation of the 1950s and 1960s.
Always original and full of style and humor - among his identifying marks was a Lacoste logo tattooed at the level of his left nipple - he used to keep two lists in his pocket that he would take out as explanatory guides to his century. One featured around 20 names of personalities born in the same year as him, 1928, including filmmaker Federico Fellini, fellow photographers Elliott Erwitt and William Klein, and artist Andy Warhol, not to mention Mickey Mouse, his most inspiring motif: an idol who was both eternally youthful and constantly being renewed without losing his essence. The second list was made up of songs that had marked his youth and revealed a surprisingly tender and romantic side to an enfant terrible feared by all back in the stiff Catalonia Photography Association.
It was in the group's regular discussions that Maspons radicalized his argument against so-called Salonismo , an idea that like so many others linked to the photography renewal movement revolving around the magazine AFAL (1956-1963), we owe to him. The conclusion with which he revolutionized Spanish photography was simple but convincing: in photography, art and utility go together in the same way as they do in architecture and design. In keeping with that, Maspons became the first of the group of amateurs to take the step of quitting his job - at an insurance company - in order to devote himself professionally to photography, an activity that for him required both creativity and "the artistic" element, which even he was embarrassed to mention.
In the tough conditions of the dictatorship when there was no graphic press, hardly any advertising and plenty of conservative thinking and official censorship, Maspons created a space for irony, conceptual freshness and a vitality of style in his work that infected photographer friends such as Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs, Leopoldo Pomés, Ramón Masats, Paco Ontañón and Colita, as well as artists in other spheres of the gauche divine in the 1970s, a tribe of which he was also the guru.
Among his identifying marks was a Lacoste tattoo by his left nipple
In 1961 Maspons teamed up with Julio Ubiña with whom he opened the most modern studio in the country. The pair worked with the best magazines of the day, including Paris Match, L'Oeil and Gaceta Illustrada, in which Maspons published reports on the likes of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, Jackie Stewart and Fidel Castro. In 1975 he began working with Interviú, covering stories in Chile, the US, Brazil, Thailand, Japan, India and elsewhere. During the 1960s he also worked as a photographer for Fellini and fellow filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, as well as the Venice Film Festival.
Maspons published 10 or so books, including the famous La caza de la perdiz roja (or, The hunt for the red-legged partridge), with text by Miguel Delibes and, along with Ubiña, Toreo de salón (or, Lounge matador), with text by Camilo José Cela, both from 1963.
His resume is long, varied and interesting, as befits a man so long-lived and eager for experiences - he was also the first of the group to gain international recognition when in 1958 the Museum of Modern Art acquired three of his photographs for its permanent collection. With so much under his belt, it is surely comprehensible why we admirers do not understand how such as great photographer could never have been awarded the National Photography Prize when he was the guide for everyone who came after him.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Gift of a lifetime / Colom hands over image archive
PHOTOGRAPHY
Gift of a lifetime: Colom hands over image archive
Photographer donates his life's work to National Art Museum of Catalonia
ROBERTA BOSCO
Barcelona - Jul 22, 2012 - 06:42
Joan Colom, one of the great figures of what came to be known as Spain's New Photography Avant-Garde, has donated his entire archive to the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). The collection comprises nearly 9,500 photographs, as many negatives, a 25-minute film of the entire material and a great many documents.
So ends a process that began over a year ago and included some moments of tension, especially after the life's work of another Catalan photographer, Agustí Centelles, was sold to the Culture Ministry and deposited in the Archives of Salamanca, rather than kept in the region.
"This is a historical moment; events of this nature are few and far between," said Miquel Roca, chairman of MNAC's board of trustees, as he thanked a visibly moved Colom for "his generosity, which is completely unselfish and without strings attached."
This of course does not mean there will be no compensation for the 90-year-old Colom. The Catalan culture department is negotiating a life pension for him and his family, the amount of which has not yet been made public. In any case, "it is not comparable with the real value of the archive," said Roca.
MNAC director Pepe Serra said Colom's work would "be showcased inside and outside the museum, in a national and international context." He also revealed a major Colom exhibition would soon be mounted and that its curator would be announced after the summer, when the museum presents the 2013 season.
Both Serra and David Balcells, photography curator at MNAC, insisted that the incorporation of Colom's work into the museum's photography holdings "opens new perspectives." They also underscored the excellent state of conservation of Colom's work, as well as the photographer's meticulous care in preserving his archive in good order - possibly a consequence of the fact he worked an accountant all his life.
Yet not all critics and colleagues from the same period - Oriol Maspons, Francesc Català Roca, Xavier Miserachs, Colita, Leopoldo Pomés, to name a few - shared his technique of not looking through the viewfinder so his subjects would not realize he was aiming his camera at them; he later selected the framing during the developing work. This system allowed him to capture images of prostitution and of Barcelona's notorious Barrio Chino that have remained impactful throughout the years.
An atypical character and an atypical photographer, Colom was praised as one of the greats of Spanish postwar photography, then largely forgotten again after 1964, as a result of a lawsuit brought against him by a prostitute who recognized herself in a photograph from the book Izas, rabizas y colipoterras , which included texts by Camilo José Cela - an innovative collaboration between a photographer and a writer.
The scandal caused by the book and the lawsuit pushed Colom into a depression and he quit photography until the early 1990s, when he began working in color.
His institutional comeback began in 1999, when the MNAC reproduced El carrer , his only solo show in Barcelona during his earlier period. That original exhibition, organized by Sala Aixelà in 1961, brought together a collection of shots taken between 1958 and 1960 in the Barrio Chino, and their quality awarded him a central spot among the Spanish photographers of his generation.
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