MEY RAHOLA, IN SEARCH OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

2023-05-05 13:27:14

MEY RAHOLA, IN SEARCH OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

Mª Ángeles Cabré

We are in luck. Just as in 2019 the Rocío Santa Cruz Gallery recovered the extremely interesting photographer Palmira Puig-Giró (Tàrrega, 1912-Barcelona, ​​1978), a great find, now we add one more to our art history. The title already says it all: “Mey Rahola. The new photographer. Because above all Rahola (León, 1897-Vaucresson, 1959) must be included in the group of women who, mainly in the years of the Second Republic, gave birth to a new woman and what I call “the forgotten generation”. And that is why the image chosen to announce the exhibition presents three women with their arms raised reaching for a ball (“Ball Players”, 1936): an image of self-improvement, but also playful. Because women’s sport is one of the elements to be highlighted in the construction of this new femininity, which breaks with the immediately previous one, introducing freedom and movement. In 1928, the Club Femení i d’Esports had been inaugurated in Barcelona and the press began to fill up with articles signed by women about the female practice of sport.

His photographs always move away from statism and seek dynamism. While those of Puig-Giró are more abstract and experimental, more artistic, Rahola shows the desire to capture elements in the process of change, just as changing were the years in which she had to live her first and successful professional steps. We found photographs of him in publications of the time such as company Women’s magazineedited by the Unió de Dones de Catalunya -organization integrated within the Association of Anti-fascist Women- or From Here and Therea cultural magazine that valued photography and where Man Ray was even published.

Rahola was the only Spanish woman admitted to the Barcelona International Salon of Photographic Art held in 1935, where she presented three photographs of seascapes. Before the outbreak of the war, among other things, Ella Rahola photographed items related to navigation. Boats and fishing baskets appear in her images in high angle and low angle views. “Cops de mar amb mal temps” (1936) shows, for example, the prow of a sailboat breaking the rough waves, while in another photograph a child hangs from the ropes of a sailboat. Rahola liked the masts, the clouds, the sails and also Cadaqués, which she photographed abundantly in those thirties and where her sister Pilar portrayed her.

Only two photographs of him taken during the Civil War are preserved. One of them captures a bread tail -taken is estimated to be between 1936 and 1937-; the other, to a group of women with their backs turned, looking at the coast of Cap de Creus, the arid and windy landscape of the natural park located to the north of Cadaqués. After suffering the miseries of the war, in 1939 she and her husband moved to France, to settle in Lyon in 1940. At that time, Rahola did not abandon photography, as she might have expected. Instead, he devoted himself to her professionally to ensure her livelihood.

It demonstrates her commitment to the Republic that she was the one who took the last photographs of President Azaña, which she did that same 1940 in Arcachon, shortly before he died. At that stage, his affinities with the French photographer Sabine Weiss -whose work we were able to see last summer at the Xavier Miserachs Biennial in Palafrugell and which I commented on here- are clear, not because he treated her, but because in those years everyday life gained ground among the photography professionals. It is what has been called humanist photography.

Rahola always cultivated her spirit as a modern woman and, although the victory of the nationalists and the long Francoism interrupted her normal artistic evolution -it is part of that wound that our cultural history has-, she persisted in her efforts. But in those days as an immigrant, it was not easy to grow artistically in a foreign country, so in that second stage, which lasted until the end of World War II, her journey was discreet. In 1945 she moved to the outskirts of Paris and, although she gave up her professional practice, she continued to shoot with the camera. In that third stage, her travels were a great source of inspiration. For example, the exhibition includes an image taken in Alghero of seamstresses in the open air dating from 1950.

Only ten years ago the recovery of this artistic photographer began, which allowed the conservation of her archive. The fact that she has come to exhibit at the MNAC demonstrates the desire to establish her in her canon as one of our pioneering photographers. To regret that she has not been exhibited in one of the rooms on the ground floor where temporary exhibitions are usually held; inserting it into the museum tour detracts from its value. But the MNAC, it is well known, is not exactly very fond of valuing women, something that we hope will change one day in the not too distant future.

May Rahola (1897-1959). the new photographer, MNAC, Barcelona. Until September 11, 2023

Curator: Lluís Bertran, Roser Martínez and Roser Cambray.