It’s hard to see what’s in front of us. It’s hard to understand even though we see it every day. We have it so internalized that it becomes invisible before our eyes and would barely touch us if it were not for the photographers who capture the moments and, at the same time, the background currents that move them.
Moments and currents form a river. It is enough to place them in the appropriate way and what was hidden emerges with surprising naturalness. We recognize ourselves in what we did not see. The mirror returns to us an image that we thought was lost in memory or that we had never known how to read properly.
Carles Guerra has ordered nearly 160 photographs from the Foto Colectania foundation so that they speak to each other and send us the light that we did not see. The exhibition opens with a double title: The Course of Events. An atlas of the Foto Colectania collection.
Course, events and atlas are metaphors of a route capable of uniting time without moving from the same place.
The Foto Colectania catalog is unique. More than 3,000 photographs by Spanish and Portuguese authors from the second half of the 20th century to today. Guerra has spent months immersed in this background, selecting the images that could best explain the transition from marginality to modernity that our ancestors made and that we repeat now to pass on to our descendants.
The result is a dialogue between 32 photographers, who in turn speak with the people and situations they portrayed in different times and places.
The protagonists have not seen each other’s faces, but they recognize each other thanks to documentary, opportunistic and artistic photography, facilitator of encounters and creator of new realities.
Empathy emerges even in the harshest and most burned images, whether due to the sun or the social context. The comfort of what is known and hope in what is not yet known emerges.
Certainty in the future can be seen even under the dictator’s leadership and violence against those who dared to challenge him. Also in the streets where machismo ruled and in the rural and telluric folklore that told us about the forces that could only be felt.
Guerra gets the contemporary storks of Txema Salvans to land in the housing blocks built half a century ago to shelter emigrants. As always, since forever, they have flown over empty and ruined Spain to announce to us that there is a tomorrow, if not better, at least possible.
The best photography has the power to restore meaning and dignity. The Spaniards who left rural Spain in the sixties to be reborn in the cities can still see in the same sky the messenger birds that tell them about what they left behind, but also about what they have built.
In this process, man’s destiny is, to say the least, uncertain. Nothing guarantees that his imprint will prevail. Most likely, he will perish in the human and anonymous current that retains only what is essential. Xavier Miserachs was able to portray this return to nothingness when a man crossed his camera one day in 1962. He was disfigured, transformed into a specter, an unfathomable soul.
The Iberia that Foto Colectania narrates is subjective and, at the same time, real. It shows us that the truth does not lie in the reality of the moment but in the interpretation of the future. This is our privilege, as will be that of those who come after us.
The course of events. An atlas of the Foto Colectania collection FotoColectania Barcelona www.fotocolectania.org Until June 2
