After a friend and I visited a photography exhibition in Valencia last Saturday, we saw a book in the gift shop entitled Como leer la fotografía [How to Read Photography]. We agreed that it was a book we would like to read. I can’t say I’ve studied very much about photography, but I love to “read” photographs, more or less in the same way that I interpret paintings, considering the positioning of the elements in the picture, the light and shadow, expressions on faces, and focus (maybe akin to brush strokes in painting??). I don’t know much about technique, but I do have some theoretical ideas. To me, the exceptional thing about photography is that the image is captured instantaneously; it snatches a second from real time and freezes it, makes it endure. There is something magical or mystical about this. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters that “the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” A photograph captures that encounter of the temporal and the eternal. When it freezes time, photography can point out the miraculous in the present. We could also say that, by preserving a past moment as present, it unlocks a kind of “redemptive” potential in the past, revealing a new understanding of a historic moment, giving us an inside look at how things “really were”—things that tradition and textbooks might have missed or gotten wrong. (Here I’m thinking of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who writes about photography frequently in his Arcades Project and elsewhere.)
So there’s a little bit about my “theory” of photography. All this to say, I find it spectacular when I come across an artist who has a knack for snatching seconds out of time: when someone has the eye, the instinct, the ability to plan these moments—or, more likely, plan for them, and grab them as they fly by.
In the last week, I’ve seen two exhibitions that got me thinking about all of this.
The first was an exhibition of photographs by Cristina García Rodero, a Spanish photographer who has taken some remarkable photographs of life in rural Spain (among many other things). I had seen a collection of those images earlier this summer, at another exhibition in Seville, so when I learned that the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid was showing her work, I went right away. I'm interested by a particular theme that comes up often in her work: provincial life, immersed in popular tradition and ritual, in ways that can be uplifting, comical, absurd, horrifying—and usually more than one of these at once. In the collections I saw, many of the photos are of Catholic rituals, in which blank expressions and awkward postures reveal boredom rather than spiritual elevation, or where child-sized coffins (meant to remind the devout of their mortality) point out an aspect of rural religion that is at once very material and very macabre. (This dark aspect of ritual seems to be a particular interest of the artist; she has also done some fascinating photographs of Haitian rituals. You can see some of them on her website.) García Rodero’s touches of irony—kids whose attention is elsewhere during a solemn religious rite; a coffin balanced on top of bottle crates, a priest who appears bored to tears in the confessional while an old lady leans intently to pour out her soul to him, probably for the umpteenth time that week—point out the everyday, mundane, concrete, and incongruous aspects of religion. In this, García Rodero’s approach reminds me a little of the Southern Gothic (William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor), as an artistic response to regional religious life.
The second exhibition was “Atesorar España” at the Fundación Bancaja in Valencia. It was comprised of 345 photographs from the collection of the Hispanic Society in New York, which document Spanish life from the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th (incidentally, the period I work on in Spanish literature). I was particularly impressed by the work of an American photographer, Ruth Matilda Anderson (bio in Spanish), who traveled to Spain several times in the 1920s to take pictures throughout Spain (with special attention to Galicia, the setting of García Rodero's photos). Some of my favorites were her pictures of working women and children. In general, the images document the anonymous lives of peasants and laborers in pre-Civil War Spain. In a couple of the photographs, the artist herself appears; her bobbed hair and modern clothing stand out, but not dissonantly, against the rustic backdrop.
And to top everything off, in another part of the exhibition, guess who showed up? My guy, Unamuno, posing for a portrait. I just can’t escape the dissertation…
