2023-08-07 10:45:02
The history of photography is punctuated with discoveries of hidden images that sooner or later resurface from a past that does not pass. It is to such an encounter that the exhibition devoted to the images of the Spanish Civil War taken by the Catalan photographer Antoni Campañà, known until then as an art, tourism and sports photographer, invites us. These exceptional documents were the subject of a very first exhibition in Barcelona in 2021, three years after their chance discovery by his grandson, the journalist Toni Monné Campañà, co-curator of the exhibition.
In 2018, while sorting through the last memories in the family home doomed to destruction, Toni Monné discovered, in the bric-a-brac of the garage, two red boxes containing 5,000 photos, most of them undeveloped. They were taken between 1936 and 1939, mainly in Barcelona, by his grandfather who died in 1989, who no longer wanted to show them, preferring to bury this boring memory.
Catholic and Republican
When the Civil War broke out in 1936, Campañà, aged 30, was a rising art photographer whose works, inspired first by the pictorialist current and then by the new vision of the European avant-garde, enjoy some success in international magazines and fairs. “He’s not a war photographer, it’s the war that comes to him, he’s going to experience it in a moving way”specifies Plàcid García-Planas, great reporter for the daily The vanguard and co-curator of the exhibition.
A Francoist soldier observes the village of Cerbère, in French territory, from the border coast, March 1939 / Arxiu Campañà
If he magnifies the enthusiasm of the young militiamen and the mobilization of Barcelona society through low-angle shots, Antoni Campañà, Catholic and Republican, nonetheless painfully saw the revolutionary excesses that led to the burning of churches. and the display of the remains of religious. Three years later, it will be the manifestations of the ultra-conservative religiosity of the church, back in power in the wake of the Francoist occupation, that he will photograph without concession.
A unique look
Always in tension between ethics and aesthetics, nothing escapes his camera eye or his shield camera which allows him to put a little distance between what he sees and what he feels: the departure the flower with the rifle of the militiamen for the front, the large unitary rallies, the barricades, pro-Soviet propaganda but also daily life with its queues and the nagging hunger, the survivors of the bombardments, the refugees from the disband (1).
Then there will be the parades of the Italian fascist troops, the Nazi soldiers, the military parades, the young Phalangist militants, and the propaganda Francoist. “It’s a window on the civil war that had never been opened. Without ideological bias, his photographic testimony is a punch in the face of simplification.underlines the historian Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta.
General view of the attendance at the communist-socialist-anarchist unitary meeting in the La Monumental bullring in Barcelona, October 25, 1936 / Arxiu Campañà
Richly documented, the thematic and chronological route allows, through two hundred black and white photographs by Antoni Campañà, most of which are unpublished, to better understand the complexity of this civil war and the conflictual heritage left by the Franco dictatorship to the Spanish company.
(1) Massacre of civilians on the Málaga-Almería road, on February 8, 1937, who were fleeing the arrival of Franco’s troops in Málaga, these being supported by Italian and German fascist troops.
“Antoni Campana. Hidden Icons (1936-1939) », at the People’s Pavilion in Montpellier, until September 24. To read : The red box. Ihe last great photographic treasure of the Spanish Civil War by Antoni Campañà, P. García-Planas, A. Gonzàlez i Vilalta et D. Ramos, Seuil, 332 p. €37.
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