VISUAL ART:Different approaches to photography are almost becoming separate genres, as evidenced by this strong Spanish show.
ORIGINALLY ORGANISED for China's Year of Spain in 2007, Itinerarios Afines/Affinity Pathsis a lively exhibition featuring the work of 10 contemporary Spanish photographers.
Curated by Oliva María Rubio, the show is a compact survey of photographic practice in Spain from the 1980s to the present day. In its range it reflects general trends in photography in a context much wider than Spain itself. Since its inauguration in China, it has been visiting Cervantes cultural institutes elsewhere, and is currently showing at the Instituto Cervantes in Lincoln Place in Dublin.
While the space there is limited, so that what is on view is an edited version of the whole, it is still a sizeable and qualitatively outstanding show, one that points to the opportunity to do something similar in terms of Irish photography, which has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 10 years or so.
In town for the opening of Itinerarios Afines, Rubio explained that she had a very definite strategy in putting it together. She went for artists who had established reputations, who were well known in Spain and, often, internationally.
They were, broadly, born in the late 1940s and 1950s, and in the 1960s. Then, she set out to include as many different approaches to photography as she could, for it has become increasingly apparent that there is not so much something called “photography” as “photographies”.
It’s noticeable that the artists born in the 1950s worked more within a national context, while the slightly younger ones moved more quickly on to the international stage. That doesn’t have anything to do with the relative merits of their work; it’s just that the art world has become more casually cosmopolitan, and both work and artists circulate more freely than they did in the past. In fact, probably the best-known figures in the show are children of the 1950s or, in the case of Cristina García Rodero, 1949.
From 1973, Rodero embarked on a 15-year project, documenting local rituals and festivities in regional Spain, events that were gradually dying out. The 1989 book that emerged from this mammoth undertaking, España Oculta (Hidden Spain) has become a classic, and Rodero’s approach to her work, as much as the work itself, has been enormously influential.
In the flesh, printed large, her photographs are tremendous. Although he has been working with photography since the mid-1970s, Alberto García-Alix has only latterly become internationally well-known. A gifted portraitist – there are brilliant studies of the great flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla and the young Inés Sastre in the show – Garcia-Alix has also pioneered a mode of gritty, confessional realism, chronicling physical and emotional travails with great intensity and honesty. The work of García-Alix and Rodero, together with that of one or two other artists in the show, represents a classical, straight approach to photography.
Even the name of another exhibitor, Ouka Leele, suggests the leap from modernity to post-modernity. Leele’s original name was Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma. Far from seeing the photographic negative as sacrosanct, she immediately set about painting directly on to her photographs, to great effect, producing oddly hyper-real pictorial fictions.
WHILE A documentary process is integral to the work of Bleda y Rosa and Xavier Ribas, they too embody novel photographic approaches. Bleda y Rosa are María Bleda and José María Rosa, and their many projects share a fascination for traces of things long gone.
The large-scale landscapes in the exhibition are records of the sites of ancient battles, ozymandian expanses of mostly wildflowers and the occasional ruin. They are beautiful images that, as Rubiopoints out, are completed by the accompanying text that identifies the location and the date of the battle that took place there.
This cool, long-distance mode of documentation is also evident in the work of Ribas, who has shown previously in Ireland. His Sundays series are large-scale, deep-focus, highly detailed accounts of places in or around Barcelona where people enjoy their leisure time on Sundays.
But rather than seeking out regular sites of recreation, Ribas set out to find odd, anomalous spaces that individuals had unofficially colonised: pieces of scrubland, underpasses, not the kind of places automatically associated with leisure and relaxation.
Javier Vallhonrat’s work is highly conceptualised. In the series of photographs included in the show, he places models of various kinds of building in real landscapes and pictures them by night. The results are extraordinary, real and unreal, and slightly uncanny. Chema Madoz makes more formalised conceptual images incorporating visual and linguistic puns. Cristóbal Hara is analytical in his use of reportage techniques. Many of his engaging, oblique images look staged and contrived, but they are not; he has patiently sought them out and waited for the right moment.
There isn’t a weak note in the show. Ángel Marcos’s photographs of Havana and Ferran Freixa’s crisply formalised studies of details of different kinds of social space are world’s apart in terms of their thinking but equally compelling.
The exhibition is aptly titled. Rubio has succeeded not only in indicating the richness of current and recent Spanish photography, but also in mapping a harmonious plurality of endeavour. There are several different photographies, and they all usefully inform our world in their own ways.
Itinerarios Afines/Affinity Paths: Contemporary Spanish Photography Through the Work of 10 Artists.Instituto Cervantes, Lincoln House, Lincoln Place Until May 23
