Emilia Gutiérrez attended the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies this Wednesday to, as so many other times, not miss any details from your honorable Members. Beyond the news, that she “can jump at any time”, her list of tasks included portraying Nadia Calviño, who aims to be her last plenary session as first vice president of the Government. But it turns out that it was hers too, although she hadn’t told many people.
“The surprise was enormous” when, through the viewfinder of her camera, she captured a chamber standing up applauding her in tribute to her long career as a photographer for La Vanguardia. “It’s hard sometimes to have people look at you on camera and, suddenly, I found that everyone was doing it at the same time,” she says, still nervous.
The person in charge of making public a fact that Emilia had only told one of the ushers, and a few fellow workers, was the PSOE spokesperson, Patxi López. “It is part of the history” of this Chamber “and today is its last plenary session,” the socialist spokesperson revealed before beginning his speech in the plenary session of Congress where the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, appears to give explanations of the recent European councils.
A few words of recognition after which the Basque deputy has asked for a farewell applause for a regular in the corridors and in the plenary sessions of the Chamber since it began in 1986, with the Third Legislature in which Felipe González was President of the Government.
“There are many memories. From the tense face-to-face between González and Aznar to the camera crew due to the death of José Couso in Iraq or the image of a soulless chamber in the middle of the pandemic… And I left many others. Many But my legs are still shaking and I’m not able to think clearly,” he says, his voice broken by pride.
Patxi López has valued Emilia’s work as a female photographer and has remembered when she told her “that when a woman took a good photo they said it was a pretty photo and when a man took it it was a photon. And that shows how much we have still have to move forward. “So thank you very much for all your photons,” she told Emilia who didn’t know how to ask everyone to stop applauding and sit down. “I know it’s a memory that I’m going to take with me, but at the moment I experienced it almost like a nightmare,” says a discreet photographer who, unintentionally, has starred in the image of the day in Congress.
