We tend to look at old domestic photographs with nostalgia, with curiosity, but also as if we were looking at something arbitrary and unimportant. And, on the other hand, it is a material that is crossed by many imaginaries, precisely because of its massive nature, because they were made by many people, and they offer us invaluable information about the aspirations and ways of seeing the world of a certain era. , says Núria F. Rius, historian and curator of The Domestic Camera, an exhibition at the KBr of the Mapfre Foundation that explores the mass production of images by thousands of amateurs in Catalonia between 1880 and 1936.
Through a selection of nearly 300 pieces, the exhibition shows how the popularity of domestic photography from 1900 onwards not only took root among a male audience of a high socioeconomic level, but was a transversal phenomenon that also spread through athenaeums. and workers’ cultural associations, and in which women and children also participated. Fans, whose gaze was conditioned by cinema and the press, and who became a kind of local chroniclers as well as chroniclers of family life.
Images that show historical events or happy and leisure moments, often dramatized for the camera. There are also those that never left the privacy of the home and were made for domestic consumption, such as female nudes or a series of homoerotic self-portraits in which a naked man explores his body.
