The Diputació de Girona has opened one interactive virtual exhibition from the exhibition ‘Valentí Fargnoli, the landscape revealed’. With just one click, internet users can take a visual tour of the reality of Girona’s counties a century ago, seen through Fargnoli’s particular lens. You can see moments of everyday life and different landscapes, some of which are unrecognizable. Among the snapshots of the virtual exhibition there is a photo of the bay of Cadaqués in 1920, an image of snowy Girona in 1926 taken from Montjuïc, farmers in a farmhouse in Llorà or women mending fishing nets in Roses. To access the virtual exhibition, it must be done through the website of the Image Center of the Provincial Council, INSPAI.
For more than three years, from 2019 until this September 2022, the exhibition ‘Valentí Fargnoli, the revealed landscape’ has been traveling through different municipalities in the Girona counties. From now on, the exhibition can also be viewed virtually. INSPAI has activated a space on its website that allows you to retrieve this photographic sample and take an interactive tour of it.
It is about the recreation of the penultimate stop of the exhibition, which took place in the La Capella de l’Antic Hospital area of the History Museum of Sant Feliu de Guíxols between May and September. The Internet user can not only move virtually around the room, but you can enlarge the images and the different information panels with a single click.
‘Valentí Fargnoli, the landscape revealed’ makes it possible to reconstruct, through the photographer’s gaze and camera, the reality of Girona’s counties a century ago. You can see moments of everyday life and scenes from our history. Some of these landscapes are intact; others, unrecognizable or, directly, lost forever.
The images in the exhibition, produced on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of one of the most outstanding photographers of the first half of the 20th century (Barcelona, 1885 – Girona, 1944), come from the original photographs of Valentí Fargnoli of the funds that INSPAI keeps, guards and has digitized. Among these funds, the Fargnoli Fund stands out, composed of 834 glass plates, with photographs from 1910 to 1944 and which was entered into INSPAI on May 19, 2011.
The show was part of the Traveling Exhibitions Program of the Girona Province and made stops in seventeen municipalities in the demarcation, since it was inaugurated on April 2, 2019 at the Casa de Cultura de Girona. He has been to Maçanet de la Selva, Peralada, Amer, Garrigàs, Lloret de Mar, Olot, Vilablareix, Fortià, Llançà, l’Escala, Banyoles, Santa Coloma de Farners, Salt, Palafrugell, Verges and Sant Feliu de Guíxols, before ‘end the tour in Girona, last September 20, in the lobby of the Auditorium, on the occasion of the Girona Literary Awards.
Second edition
INSPAI has also decided to republish the tenth volume of the ‘Quaderns de Fotografia’ (the collection that was born with the desire to give relevance to the work of photographers who have donated their funds to INSPAI). Having sold out the 700 copies of the first edition on the occasion of the Year of Fargnoli (2019), ‘Valentí Fargnoli: A persistent memory’ returns with 600 more copies, which incorporate some new data thanks to the research work of Carmen Perrotta.
The publication maintains a selection of author’s texts that, with a contemporary perspective and from disciplines as diverse as the history of art, architecture, literature or the history of photography, offer a choral and multifaceted image of Valentin Fargnoli. The contributions are from the archivist and art historian Marta Grassot, the architect Sílvia Musquera, the art historian Mariona Seguranyes and the journalist Eva Vàzquez.
Likewise, the photo album presents a wide selection of images that take the city of Girona as their starting point, travel towards the interior regions through mountain areas and end the journey at the seaside.
Carmen Perrotta’s contribution has consisted of a study and a comparative analysis between Valentí Fargnoli’s photographs kept at the Amatller Institute of Hispanic Art, in the Adolf Mas collection, and those of the Valentí Fargnoli Collection kept by INSPAI.
By locating the matching photographs, Perrotta has been able to obtain relevant information—such as more precise dating or hypotheses about the creation of reports or the way in which the photographer executed the images—which has been incorporated into this updated volume .