Miguel Ángel Campano: 'El Naufragio' [The Shipwreck, 1984] (detail)

Itineraries

SLOW PRESENCE, by Margarita Ledo

Any exploration of an art collection —in this case an institutional one— through the medium of its photographic works is a reflection of the journey taken by the image itself, in that it inescapably links three different spheres:

The observer and his or her perception as a sensory experience; the formal proposal, with its intellectual and creative echoes; and the materials as a symptom, signifying both loss and celebration, appearance and disappearance.

These concepts are reflected in art practices that border on the vestigial, the mise-en-scène, the absence/presence of the body, the mannerist and the low-code.

Given the eclectic, contemporary nature of the photography section in the Banco de España Collection, it necessarily embraces a multitude of different approaches. This ‘special distinction’ afforded to a small number of works takes in certain photos that have a sense of the "uncanny"— a disruption of the familiar and a tactility. There is also some sense of transitivity between them, which means that we can go from one to the next with that sense of unease that is engendered when some visual event bursts upon us. It has something to do with those other works in which the poetics of their construction enables us to decipher the notation of the device and the authorial experience, in such a way that things, á la Bataille, just happen. And it has something to do with the intimacy of the institution, the Banco de España, and its image, concluding an itinerary in which art, expression and communication are constitutive categories of a change in attitudes towards artistic creation, back in the early 1970s, when photography began to be used as a sensitive surface while the output of its procedures and its function were enlisted as a record to trap actions/thoughts.

The works in this itinerary include photo-essays, pop art, conceptual art, intervention, seriality and land art. The monument appears constantly as an index, the format or concision of a text in the intentio auctoris, the intuition in each photo of what we cannot see.

Margarita Ledo Andión - Professor of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, University of Santiago de Compostela

Semiòpolis: Prophecies (Nausée - Sartre). Joan Fontcuberta

Being in the Moment (4 parts). Richard Long

Entrance to Lategan's Truck Inn on the N1 in the time of Aids, Laingsburg, Western Cape. 14 November 2004. David Goldblatt

The Treasure Chamber. Perspective I. Cristina Lucas

From series 17 proposition P6. Joana Pimentel

Bank of Spain Madrid VII 2000. Candida Höfer

Sans titre (Tour Eiffel) [Untitled (Eiffel Tower)]

Pierre Boucher

This was a time when we were learning to see what only existed in photography. Axial rotation, the cult of the language of the camera in overprinting, the contrasts, the active backgrounds cultivated by Jean Epstein, who viewed photogenics and atmosphere as a form of energy between the modern photo and the viewer.

Hands only

Bruce Nauman

Action with hints of the theatre; the body as a form of material to be manipulated, as both background and figure. An image constructed through a photographic arrangement that assembles the compositional elements —extreme close-up, chroma key, texture, medium shot— to transcend the referent and two-dimensionality.

Snow Fall II

Darío Villalba

Experimenting with pairs of opposites, with chirographic resonances in the way paint strokes are deposited, in order to sensitise the surface of the photograph. The body as an enduring silhouette, bringing order to space, triggering the inclination of the eye, expresses a form of déjà-vu, a situation of which we might be the protagonists.

Cacique Quimbaya

Aleix Plademunt

The rigour and control of the techno-structure, ensuring that the light brings out the volume and with it the otherness in the depiction, the figure without background, dreaming of Borgesian eternities emanating from a cultural distance, from something that can now only be salvaged in a photograph.

Manufacturing situations which, due to their discursive context, we interpret as being reflexive; dematerialising representation, turning to another system of signs, Braille, to echo Merleau-Ponty: that which is seen occurs in some place in tactile space. Form and photo as tools of thought.

El lamento de un perro [A Dog's Lament]

Alberto García-Alix

The photographer's painstaking sensuality here is paradigmatic, combining a format that is tailored to the subject of the work, a transient framing, an instability in definition, and atmosphere as an omen, which resides in what the eye sees and in the pleasure of the photo.

Tejados [Rooftops]

Magdalena Correa

Photographing as a way of seeing —an idea that can be associated with the tradition of the photo-essay— and a decision to explore underexposed subjects, to stand with and observe fragments of existence in the world-space and from the nominal mark of apartheid: La Rinconada. Gold mine, subjective compilation of indices, slow entry into the physicality of the real.

Yuste II (Niebla) [Yuste II (Fog)]

Axel Hütte

Real scenery and an unbounded photographic space, far from contemplative imaginary and close to the abyss. In each image the photographer triggers different elements of language; in consonance with animistic geographers, the landscape becomes the sensation aroused by the landscape and it flows upon observance of its image.

Beneath the Surface I

Willie Doherty

An innocuous place. An absence of signs. The overhead shot frames something eminently material, on which we are about to trample, breaking its intricate workings and the darkness of its harmony. Our eyes in the photographer's eyes. Out-of-shot, Northern Ireland. Presence, photography and politics.

Being in the Moment (4 parts)

Richard Long

The action of walking until the encounter occurs, like an event. Space and its double as a sign, creative matter and the desire to live that moment, so that once it has passed, it can be fixed as a memory. The future of the present in one of the underlying uses of photography.

Sin título. Huella 33 [Untitled. Footprint 33]

Montserrat Soto

Wandering in pursuit of the built, in order to bring continuity to the function of the photograph as a form of mediation for an involuntary archive and to the act of photography as an accumulation of vestiges. An ideological image, a highly contrasted Memorial. In the darkness, the enigma. In the light, ruin.

50 kg. de yeso [50 Kg of Plaster in the Street]

Santiago Sierra

One of the frequent functions of art photography is to document a political intervention in a given space. In this case, it makes use of the reverse, the trace of an action densified by the text, whose structure, internal movement and collision is accentuated by the image.

Seduzir [To Seduce]

Helena Almeida

This is her vocabulary and her elemental mismatch, the interchangeable body, the social gesture, she/the other, like that other intrusive material, the red line, the plastic and symbolic effect, the oxymoron in the separation of the two feet, which, when called upon to move to the beat, cannot leave the past behind.

Entrance to Lategan’s truck Inn on the N1 in the time of Aids, Laingsburg, Western Cape. 14 November 2004

David Goldblatt

The framing, the angle in transit, taken slightly from below. Documenting the scars established and signified by each object and each mark. A simple text offers a chance of understanding the reason for choosing this place and its precariousness as the politics of the image.

La cámara del tesoro. Perspectiva I [The Treasure Vault Perspective I]

Cristina Lucas

Photographing the best-kept secret like a relic. The distance, the scale, the reflection, the silence, the Constat photo. The author's positioning in the intimacy of her model, of the building she walks through and records, as a piece to be threaded into her work/treatise entitled ‘It's Capital’.

Medusa [Jellyfish]

Miguel Rio Branco

We have the colours: red, blue-tan, golden light; we have the rhythm and the atmosphere; we have the sensation invoked in the observers of these variations, a sensation that through cinema and painting, he achieves in his more narrative photographs and abstract works. The leitmotiv: attaining ‘meaningful moments’.

From serie 17 proposition P6

Joana Pimentel

Appropriation of a fluid, low-code image, perhaps to illustrate the invisible. The inclusion of different systems —music, a dilemmatic note by Wittgenstein— turn it into it a complex artifact. The work is taken from an artist's book and from her trip to an archipelago.

Banco de España Madrid VII 2000

Candida Höfer

The medium shot, the contemplation of the object, its connotation of form, chroma key and each individual material. The centrifugal construction, by which one is repelled and at once optically absorbed, lies in the photographer's relationship with canonical spaces as a visual experience. The straight photo acting as an echo.

Restauración [Restoration]

Jorge Ribalta

From within photographic culture, like the workbooks that invite us to explore different cosmogonies by varying the syntax between different groups of images, ‘Restoration’ builds narratives with scenarios, time and characters to ultimately achieve the symbols and the fortune-ideologeme of a palimpsest/building.

Dessert (Collapse) [Desert (Collapse)]

Bridget Smith

Our perception is destabilised by the one footstep that transforms an observable landscape into something vast, radicalised by the reduction in tone and definition. The vestige as a furtive inscription. Plasticity as a "trompe l'oeil", a false utopia.

Observaciones sobre los colores [Observations on Colours]

Ambra Polidori

One of the few photos in which someone stares back at us, in one of those places where it is unnecessary to add anything but the body of the representation, the house-on-the-back, the decision to interweave axes, masses and planes, with echoes of Sisyphus.

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