the harsh reality of photography

Coincides in Madrid documentary genealogies with another exhibition at the Juan March Foundation, stop, instant, which includes a good number of photographs from the same period as this one: 1848-1917. But the approach is different: while the March rehearses an aesthetic and thematic path based on what two private collectors collected –which greatly limits the options–, here an artist, Jorge Ribalta, establishes a more ambitious but also partial point of view that It helps that he brings history to his home ground, as he practices, updated, the same type of photography that is analyzed in the exhibition.

And as happened in his previous exhibition projects at Reina Sofía, The workers photography movement (2010), Not yet. About the reinvention of documentary (2015) and Marc Pataut's retrospective, do not hide the ideological bias of the now inaugurated exhibition, very much in tune with the museum. Consider, to measure the link, that in the fifteen years of Borja-Villel's direction, in addition to these four exhibitions at Ribalta, there were only eleven individual exhibitions of photographers, one group exhibition (Afal), a small one with photobooks and a large one that the curator Lynne Cooke, mixed use of manhattan.

[The ghostly museum of photography, in the decisive moment]

His argument is based on the interpretation made by the Marxist historian André Rouille in The empire of photography (1982) of the connections between this medium and industrialization and capitalism, and aims to expose the power relations that were strengthened by the camera, a bourgeois tool. Thus, he traces in the images the presence of “subaltern figures” – servants, beggars, workers, unemployed people, slaves, prisoners, sick people – over whom photography exerted its symbolic violence. It's really an interesting perspective, which we need to know and apply to the study of the history of photography in all its dimensions. The problem is that disfigures the original meaning of many of the selected works.

Among the approximately 500 pieces that make up the exhibition, you will find a large number of works, almost legendary, mandatory mention in any history of photography. practically everything in vintage. As I already indicated about stop, instantthe lack of a photography museum in Spain makes these encounters even more exciting.

And, despite the immense outrage produced by a montage in which the cards group the data of up to 18 works, which sometimes confuses those of different photographers as if authorship were something secondary – this is when what is in charge is the “thesis” –, and which lacks the didactic mandate of giving us some clues about each of the series, the confluence of so many main pieces makes the occasion unique and memorable.

Ribalta manages his narration very well and has almost all the “illustrations” he could want. The great references of social photography at the time agree: David Octavius ​​Hill/Robert Adamson and his catalog of portraits of Newhaven fishermen; Jacob Riis and the slums of New York; john thomson and life on the streets of London; Herman Drawe and the underworld of Vienna; any Lewis Hine and its report on child exploitation. But documentary photography goes beyond social reporting – far beyond what is covered in the exhibition, which focuses on the effects of capitalism and colonialism – and presents developments with their own weight.

In each chapter emphasizes the human element even when it was not central to the projects, which produces those occasional distortions of meaning that I mentioned, recognized by the curator when he admits that such presence initially constitutes an “accidental or marginal irruption” in “paintings whose intention is different”. What happens is that photographers, following the tradition of seeThey liked to include popular characters in their natural or urban landscapes – even in the documentation of monuments, public works or urban remodeling – that gave them a local flavor.

[Afal, a chronicle of Spanish intrahistory]

And, in the same way, some portraits of social groups, aligned with the genre of “types”, are more picturesque than social critical, as we can see with particular clarity in the photographs taken in Spain by Laurent – ​​see his types of spanish–, atkinson or Clifford.

Two areas receive special attention. One is the revolutions, with classic images from 1848 and 1871 in Paris, the Tragic Week in Barcelona and a profuse display of the Russian Revolution. And with two types of dominant images that had great informative but also commercial dissemination and even, in the French capital, functioned as a tourist attraction: the barricades and the ruins. The other, of enormous attraction, brings together under the chapter “The body and the archive”, in two rooms, photography at the service of anthropology, police control, war and “modern” medicine.

The confluence of so many key pieces in this exhibition makes the occasion unique and memorable.

Indigenous nations were of interest to Timothy O'Sullivan –although it is a side view in his task of registering the territory as a participant in official geological expeditions– and for Aby Warburg, but especially for Edward S. Curtis, which is not in the exhibition. We have examples of standardized photographs of individuals of various races for anthropological study (albums of carl dammann), an area in which the photographic activity of the pioneer in “fieldwork” stands out in the western Pacific. Bronislaw Malinowski.

From the war photographs, those of the dead were selected (Alexander Gardner) and those of the injured (the surgeon Reed Bontecou). Between the judiciary and police we have jewels such as the experiments of Francisco Galton combination of portraits to compose “typical criminals”, the crime scenes of Emil Wrbata and the anthropometric identification display of alphonse bertillon!

In the medical chapter, the most cruel ones could not be missing: photos of hermaphrodites from Swimof “hysterical” in Iconography of the Salpétriêre from the doctor charcot or faces deformed by electrical stimuli in Dr. duchenne. But they do not forget the gentler decomposition of the movement of Eadweard Muybridge any Jules Marey.

All are manifestations, recalls the curator, of a “new archival unconscious, symptomatic of the hegemony of positivism”, which has as its ultimate objective social discipline.

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