In the seventies, in the same building where the Venus Dome existed, an emblematic place of the most transgressive Barcelona of the time (“the Sistine Chapel of the Chinatown”, in the words of Jaume Sisa), there was a boarding house that welcomed transsexuals who struggled to survive their precarious lives. There she met Pilar Aymerich (Barcelona, ??1943) and Kathy, a truck driver from Córdoba who had traveled to Barcelona to reassign her sex. She photographed her in her room on La Rambla, giving rise to images that travel from the intimate and personal to the portrait of an effervescent and rebellious moment, which it took the photographer many years to publish.
Half a century later, those portraits continue to arouse admiration, whether in the current retrospective of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, Memoria Vivida, which in September 2024 will travel to Tecla Sala de l’Hospitalet, or in ParisPhoto, where just a few days ago A collector acquired the complete series and is now transferring it for display at the RocioSantaCruz gallery as part of its new exhibition, Los vintages de Pilar Aymerich.
During the seventies and eighties, Pilar Aymerich, winner of the National Photography Prize in 2021, was in the front row in strikes, demonstrations, protests, witnessing a changing world, that of the end of Francoism and the Transition, not as a mere observer. , but by mixing in the environment, knowing the situations in depth and then leaving testimony of them. In RocioSantaCruz she shows a careful selection of about sixty images, all of them vintage copies revealed by her author and some unpublished.
This is the case of the first carnival authorized during the Franco dictatorship in Vilanova i la Geltrú, in 1972, in which transvestites and transsexuals abandoned clandestinity for a few days, exploding their joy in the streets, despite the fact that they were still considered lazy and thugs. and the Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation law was still in force, which implied imprisonment in prison for those who carried out “acts of homosexuality.”
The year after the modification of the law, which put an end to the legal persecution of homosexuals, the first Gay Pride was celebrated in Barcelona, ??where Aymerich’s camera concentrates an entire history of liberation in what seems like a minimal gesture: a young man with sunglasses and lipstick on his lips, on whose chest he wears a badge: “Faggot? Yes, thank you.”
At a time when the divorce law did not exist and adultery was punishable by up to six years in prison, the photographer also photographed feminist rallies in front of the courts (a very young Maruja Torres with the sign “Jo també sóc adultera”) and documented also one of the first demonstrations against sexist violence, which took place in 1977 after the brutal rape and murder of Antònia España, a worker from Sabadell. Aymerich freezes the head of the march as she passes by the Comedia cinema, where they are showing a tacky Italian comedy crudely titled The Sins of the Ardent Man.
The selection also includes some of her best-known reports, such as the one on the women’s prison in the Trinidad neighborhood, along with others rarely seen, such as the one on child and youth prostitution in the urinals of Plaza de Catalunya or the staging of a exhibition by Arístides Maillol at the Palau Macaya, in which in the hands of the workers and with the ropes around their necks, the bronze sculptures look like flesh and blood.