Marta Sentís (Barcelona, ??1949) was an intrepid traveler before becoming an excellent photographer. Every day is mine is the first retrospective exhibition on his work. Organized by the Vila Casas Foundation, it brings together more than two hundred photographs taken between 1975 and 2020 and can be visited at Palau Solterra (Torroella de Montgrí, Girona) until November 19. The curator, Alejandro Castellote, emphasizes that close to seventy percent were unpublished.
The exhibition takes its title from a verse by Fernando Pessoa: between my birth and my death – as the Portuguese poet used to say – “every day is mine”. This affirmation of spiritual independence coincides with the autobiographical and libertarian nature of all Marta Sentís’ photographic work, which is splendid, especially when expressed through color. In some respects, however, he is nothing like the author of Tabaquería: his adventures have been physical, nomadic as well as spiritual, and the photos give off a vitality and a sense of freedom that are happily contagious.
From the 1970s and 1980s to Barcelona and New York, his gaze traveled to numerous southern and eastern countries: the Maldives islands in 1976 – he traveled through the Indian Ocean archipelago for ten months -, Cairo, Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia and Yemen during the eighties and Brazil since 1989. I ask him for some details of the photographic trips and he answers me this way, from Ibiza, by email: “It’s true, I lived a but on a deserted island, where the owner, a Maldivian, who collected the coconuts every four weeks, left me. They left me with a tankard of water, flour, sugar, tea and a fishing rod. I never caught anything. I lived on chapatis – cakes – that she made for me, dry fish (hard as a stone) and coconuts that fell, hopefully not on your head. I had been traveling with fishermen from island to island for months, and I got tired of being watched all the time. I wanted to be alone. It was when I stopped working at the office of the World Health Organization, in New York, because the offices depress me. I’m also depressed by the lab, one of the reasons I switched to color. In the Maldives it became clear to me that I was happiest without anything, in the open air. Today it is very expensive to live like this, but back then it seemed the most normal thing. A few months had already passed, when I was 17 years old, sleeping with a friend (Aniceto Ciscar) on the Greek islands with a sleeping bag, or living a few summer months in Formentera on the beach with my sister Mireia, with a tent in pareos and walking an hour a day to eat a salad in a snack bar. Also in the US I lived with an anthropologist and filmmaker who had filmed a lot in Sudan and lived in a disused train station. And with my son’s father, a Brazilian, who was a traveling craftsman, we spent months selling things on the ground, in Amazonian villages… Or with another English friend, when he was studying English at Oxford, we went all over Scotland hitchhiking, sleeping in abandoned cars or in the countryside. Before and after using photography as a tool, I wanted to know the world and people. Today there are companies that sell you adventure, but that used to be free. Everything has been monetized.”
In the photos of Marta Sentís, you can see that her view of people from African or Afro-descendant cultures, Arabs, or from other countries, is close. It is not the gaze of the Western tourist almost blinded by prejudice, who only looks for the exotic and does not want to understand anything, nor that of the photojournalist or the anthropologist who analyze from a distance. She first lives and then photographs. In the snapshots, we will not find tragic scenes. Precisely, what attracts the attention of his African or Brazilian photos is the ability to show the vital and luminous side of what we Westerners have described as the “third” world. A happy third world? In the catalog for the Rooms and Migrations exhibition, Sentís addressed the issue in this way: “There is a Western morbidness that wants to see how you suffer when you are poor, I suppose to console yourself with the unhappiness that possessions bring. A Third Worlder who, in addition to being poor, is happy and free and doesn’t work, is handsome and has a good time destroys all the theories on which the supposed progress and well-being of industrialized countries is based.”
On the other hand, the exhibition includes the series The gaze of the women of Cairo, Egypt, 1981 which highlights the situation of women in masculinist cultures. They have to see the world at a distance, from windows. This repressive atmosphere contrasts with that of his photos – in black and white – from the My Generation series. Barcelona, ??seventies and eighties where his friends appear, such as Mariscal, Chef Guasch, Nazario in a bathtub licking his boyfriend’s fingers, a still grouchy Cesc Gelabert or Enrique Vila-Matas in the 1986 version, with a glass of gin and tonic the hand.
“Years later, I retired to Ibiza. I live there in isolation, but there is no more magic. You know that unrepresentable people swarm outside your forest, that the black night is over and everywhere there is the glow of some city. I miss the night of Africa, the water of Brazil, the starry sky, authentic people with their cosmogonies. However, I don’t allow myself to be nostalgic. There is work in the day to day and there are wonderful people”.
