Pilar Aymerich’s library has a life of its own. She started building it with her husband at the end of the 80s, in the apartment in Gràcia where she has her studio. They bought wood and assembled it. Then a carpenter expanded it in height and width, closed some compartments. It is next to a hallway with a display case full of old cameras, caught at flea markets. On the hydraulic floor, Lluna and Paquito play. They arrived from the shelter six years ago. Aymerich has always had cats.
The shelf went from the color of the wood to maroon and then to a salmon tone. When she was left alone, she decided to paint her green. On the left are the first ones she read, from Le Livre de Poche. She was very young and she wanted to understand the world; She assumed that the cursed authors would explain it very differently to the nuns at the French school where she studied. Alfred Jarry, Maupassant, Céline, Boris Vian, Breton, Colette’s biography, Camus. She is a messy reader, but if she likes an author, she reads it straight through. For example, Le Carré. She was very lecarrista, like Martí Gómez, who interviewed him; She would always reproach him for not telling her about her photos.
In a framed one from 1962, Aymerich and Montserrat Roig appear sitting on a step in Berga. Based on an interview with Roig and a small ploy, he achieved one of the best-known portraits of Josep Pla. Mercè Rodoreda was not enthusiastic about the photos of her either, but Aymerich took the first ones of her in ’72, another batch in ’73, and from then on the writer would always require her. Club Editor sends him her books, now stacked waiting for her place. Next to it, there are three hand-carved ivory netsukes that change faces – he doesn’t know how they got here from Japan – and a copy of Taronges d’or, from 1917, “look at the composition in the drawings.” It is a story by Lola Anglada, whom she photographed when she was already very old. She found it in a used bookstore and she has a lot of esteem for it. In fact, Aymerich wants her books. They give you peace of mind. They are characters that are part of his life and he pays attention to them.
A part of the library is dedicated to the civil war, others to politics, art, theater, cinema. He loved the surrealists. And Dostoyevsky. He reads in Spanish, Catalan, French, English and Italian, because he dated a boy from Milan while he spent some time in London (he keeps his Milanese accent). There he devoured The Golden Notebook and felt that Doris Lessing was talking about her. Simone de Beauvoir, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, would soon arrive, “so she wanted to know everything about women, about feminism, she read these books almost out of obligation.” Reread little. But sometimes he recovers ten or twenty pages of a novel to relive emotions, like when he watches noir films that he has already seen, “or like when you play the same song a thousand times.” She is an artisan photographer, she believes that if you know how to turn on a washing machine, you know how to use a digital camera, but it is not of her time or her style. Nor does the electronic book have the romanticism of paper, which gives off “affection, affection, I don’t know what, that remains in the memory.”
At the top are those who will not read more. He never throws them away. He gives them away or leaves them at a counter on the street; They don’t even last five minutes. She is not compulsive, but she can stay up until five in the morning to finish some. At night she prefers to watch TV news, she declares herself addicted, “it will be professional deformation.” She reads at noon or in the afternoon; in a small interior patio, cool and quiet, with plants. Or crushed on the living room couch. Or in the studio seats.
Here, in an Ikea display case, are the books and catalogs about his work. And on a large Indian table, his latest acquisitions. Although it is more about novels, she is reading essays on images and photography, “you learn as life goes by.” She has just published La Barcelona de Pilar Aymerich. It’s okay to leave testimony, to show the feelings behind each photograph. Now that she has discovered what the world is like, she seeks deeper themes: “At my age you already have experience, you know what it means to love and fall in love; But there are other feelings that you cannot explain, and I want you to tell them to me.”
