The Reina Sofía traces the origins of the photography empire

While the Prado exhibits the work of a contemporary artist like Fernando Zóbel, curiously the Reina Sofía opens an exhibition whose time span goes from 1848 to 1917. Who said that there is no harmony between the two museums? In 2010 the Reina Sofía opened a tetralogy around documentary photography, which was born in the 20s. She did it with a sample, ‘A hard light, without compassion. The worker photography movement, 1926-1939’, which was followed in 2015 and 2018 by an exhibition on the reinvention of the documentary and a retrospective on Marc Pataut, respectively. An ambitious research project, carried out by Jorge Ribalta (he defines it as «a history of photography against the grain»), which he puts an end to, closing the circle, with the fourth episode, which addresses the origins of the documentary genre in the photograph. What in the world of cinema we would call a prequel. Eugène Atget. ‘On the shores. The NAP. The small trades of Paris’. Vintage copy from 1904 Museo Reina Sofía It is surprising to see in the white cube of the contemporary museum daguerreotypes hanging on its walls. In one of Louis Daguerre’s first plaques, ‘Boulevard du Temple’, from 1838, the image of a shoeshine boy accidentally appeared. It is considered the first known photograph of a worker. Ten years later, the first images of a revolution emerge: the Spring of the Peoples of 1848. Very few daguerreotypes and calotypes of those barricades in Paris have survived. On display from that year is a facsimile copy of a daguerreotype by Charles François Thibault, ‘Barricades on the rue Faubourg du Temple, June 25, 1848, seven-thirty in the morning’. It comes from the Carnavalet Museum in the Parisian capital, one of the more than fifty providers of this exhibition, which can be visited until February 27, 2023 and which Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía, describes as “unrepeatable”, since it is hardly many of these fragile works will come out again. More than half a thousand gather, but with strict conservation measures: 19-20º Celsius temperature, 30-50 Luxes… Also from the Carnavalet funds, the photograph of another barricade in Paris, this time by an unknown photographer and Taken in 1871 at the Place de la Bastille, where Marie Antoinette lost her head. Another of the pioneers of photography is Henry Fox Talbot and his images of workers. In 1859 Charles Baudelaire called photography “the handmaid of the arts.” According to Jorge Ribalta, «the documentary is a doubly minor genre, because of its instrumental and impure condition in the arts system and because of its condition as a representation of the working class. The democratic promise of the photographic image remained unfulfilled for a long time, as it remained for almost a century as an instrument in the hands of industrial and colonial bourgeois culture”, into which beggars, workers, the sick, and inmates accidentally “sneaked”. .. “A little political history” of everyday life, the popular classes, the first social struggles… Charles François Thibault, ‘Barricades on the rue Faubourg du Temple, June 25, 1848, seven thirty in the morning’ . Daguerreotype. Facsimile copy Carnavalet Museum, Paris Already in the 1850s the campaigns of national monuments appeared. Like the project of Charles Clifford, another of the big names in this exhibition, accompanying Queen Elizabeth II on her travels through Spain. Ribalta warns that “it constitutes the first organized repertoire that articulates a photographic discourse about the nation.” In addition, it is a time when the reorganization of urban centers takes place in the great European capitals: Paris (Charles Marville documents the modernization of the city carried out by Haussmann), Vienna, Barcelona, ​​Madrid… Large engineering works, the construction of the railway, work in the mines… and universal exhibitions were born. It was a few years, explains the curator, in which the first technological revolution in the history of photography took place: the combination of the collodion negative and the albumin positive. This allows the multiplicity of photography and the birth of albums. The first corpus of the working class in the history of photography appears: the fishing community in Newhaven (Scotland). The exhibition tour continues with a section on the anthropological uses of photography in the last decades of the 19th century. It is applied, on the one hand, to medicine (anatomical records, studies of hysteria and neurology); on the other, to police and judicial work, such as the identification of criminals. In addition, the Indian tribes in the American West are beginning to be documented. MORE INFORMATION news Yes Fernando Zóbel, the painter who deconstructed ancient art in pure abstraction news Yes Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, the magician of Venice news Yes A ‘Pieta’ by Goya, painted in his youth, up for auction in Madrid If the exhibition began with the revolution of 1848, it closed with other revolutions: the Paris Commune in 1871, the Tragic Week in Barcelona in 1909 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the first mobilization of the masses. This prequel to the background of documentary photography concludes with two proper names: Lewis Hine and Paul Strand. The first, which coined the term ‘social photography’ and anticipates the militant photography of the 20th century, introduced improvements for the working classes (especially in child labor). Strand, a disciple of Hine, was the founder of photographic modernity, “the Cézanne of modern photography.”