The work of press photographer Luis Ramón Marín captured the reality of Spain before and during the civil war. During Franco's time, his work was suppressed, but highlights from his secret archive will be revealed at this year's PhotoIreland Festival. JOHN BANVILLElooks at the man and his work
THE STORY OF the Spanish photographer Luis Ramón Marín, of his work as a faithful and inspired recorder of the life of his country up to and including the civil war, of the preservation of that work and the recent rediscovery of it, is emblematic of the history of Spain in the 20th century and into the 21st.
He was born in Madrid in 1884, a few months after the death of King Alfonso XII, and died in 1944, a forgotten figure whose vast photographic archive had seemingly disappeared. A man of the left, he published nothing after 1940 and the victory of the Nationalists under General Franco. Now, with the publication by Spain's Fundación Telefónica in collaboration with the Fundación Pablo Iglesias of Marín: Fotografías 1908-1940, the photographer's reputation and his testament have been recuperated triumphantly.
Marín, the name by which he signed his work, was a jobbing photographer, but one of genius. He began his career in 1908, at the age of 24, taking pictures of social events such as fiestas, carnivals, weddings, but also air shows, car and motorcycle races, industrial projects, and all manner of sporting activities from lawn tennis to, of course, bullfighting. He seems to have been the semi-official photographer to the Spanish royal family, whom he accompanied and photographed on their annual holidays in Santander and San Sebastián. He made portraits of artists and writers, of workers, politicians, sports stars and society beauties. His women, those cossetted beauties of the inter-war years, slightly congested of expression, with their prominent, glossy eyes and rosebud mouths, their delicate, narrow-strapped shoes and sheer silk dresses, gaze out at us from his pictures with calculated hauteur, seductresses still, every one.
When civil war broke out in 1936, Marín was in Madrid to record the aerial bombardment and siege of the city and the savage fighting in the surrounding hinterland, exchanging the large-format camera he had employed up to then for the fast and portable Leica, immortalised by the greatest documentary photographer of the 20th century, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Marín began working with news magazines and mainly left-wing newspapers, in particular El Paísand the short-lived La Noche,with La Nueva Españaand España Libre,as well as the highly successful La Vanguardiain Barcelona and ABC in Madrid. The main outlet for his work, however, was the daily Informaciones, where he published more than 1,000 news photographs each year for four years after its launch in 1922.
In all, the Marín archive consists of more than 18,000 negatives, most of them made of glass, although about a quarter are, or were, of cellulose nitrate, a highly unstable material, so that many of these negatives have been lost through decay. It is estimated that the archive represents only half of Marín’s total output in the three decades of his active life as a photographer.
Marín was one of many left-leaning news photographers and journalists against whom reprisals were taken after the end of the Civil War in 1939. His work, and even the memory of it, was suppressed. Francisco Serrano, managing director of Fundación Telefónica, writes, “In the Spain of 1940 what could be done with an archive that included photographs of Alfonso III and Pablo Iglesias (founder of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), president of the republic Manuel Azaña, and the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset?”
It was thought that the body of his work had been lost. It turned out, however, that Marín had collected and meticulously catalogued his archive. After his death, it was preserved for decades in a space behind a kitchen wall, by his widow, and later by his daughter, Lucía Ramón Plá and her family. Eventually the archive was handed over, in accordance with the photographer’s wishes, to the Fundación Pablo Iglesias.
In 2005, meanwhile, the highly enlightened Fundación Telefónica, which itself held a cache of about 3,000 of Marín's photographs taken when he worked for the Spanish state telephone company in the 1940s, sponsored the task of restoring and setting up a database of the entire Marín collection, and subsequently mounted an exhibition of which Marín: Fotografía 1908-1940is the catalogue.
It is fitting that Marín's work should have been saved and restored under the sponsorship of a state institution, and that this greatly gifted, stylish, astute and lyrical observer of the comédie humainehas at last, more than 100 years after his birth, found his rightful place among the giants of 20th-century photography.
The PhotoIrelandFestival is the only festival dedicated to photography in Ireland and takes place in Dublin from July 1st to July 31st. This year, the festival is divided into six strands. Collaborative Change looks at the possibilities of collaborative approaches within artistic and non-artistic disciplines; Photo Books and Open Call 2011 features the photo book as a work of art; there are a series of featured exhibitions and events, including the Luis Ramón Marín exhibition featured here; Collecting Photography is a set of talks for those who want to own a piece of the action; Summer Campus is a series of workshops and portfolio reviews; and the Off Programme will host more than 30 exhibitions around Dublin by photographers and artists of all levels. For more details, see 2011.photoireland.org.