Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Sin título 550-2 [Untitled 550-2]

Image caption
JORGE RIBALTA

Sin título 550-2 [Untitled 550-2]

  • 1998-1999
  • Gelatin silver printing on Baryta paper
  • 15 x 20 cm
  • Cat. F_85
  • Acquired in 2004
By:
Yolanda Romero Gómez

The Banco de España Collection includes a number of works by Jorge Ribalta which cover twenty years of his career, from 1998 to 2018. His output is documentary in nature, and is produced from a critical perspective. Ribalta seeks to reinvent the modern concept of the documentary record and to recoup the historical density and political dimension of photography, shying away from essentialism and nostalgia.

His works are marked by the continual use of certain features, which gives them great consistency: he usually works with small-format pictures using conventional photographic techniques in black and white for production and reproduction (using negatives and developing them chemically himself). This is a by no means insignificant part of his work, as it harks back to the history of photography and the birth of the documentary discourse in the 1920s. Another trade-mark feature of his work is the production of series, based on the idea that the meaning of photographs is enhanced by the link between pictures and words, a technique that he uses frequently. His series of pictures occupy space as a full, immersive environment. This is an implicit criticism of the tableau as a hegemonic condition of the production of public spaces for photography. It is also a defence of popular, non-artistic uses of photography that pre-date modern times.

Ribalta himself has stated that his work over the past ten years has been focused on a two-fold critical commitment: 'On the one hand the idea of the 'documentary record', its history and its current status; and on the other hand the idea of monuments, particularly in relation to the historical output based on a discourse of national identity through cultural heritage and historic monuments. In the philosophy of history, documents and monuments are two concepts that cannot be separated.' It is precisely that commitment that provides the basis for the series of photos held in the Banco de España Collection.

Yolanda Romero Gómez

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Jorge Ribalta
Barcelona 1963

Jorge Ribalta divides his time between working as an artist, an exhibition curator, a critic (he is a regular contributor to the La Vanguardia newspaper), a writer and a cultural activist. He has written a major book called Servicio Público. Conversaciones sobre financiación pública y arte contemporáneo (UAAV - University of Salamanca, 1998) and worked as Head of Public Programmes at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (1999-2009). These are all essential facets of his biography, as is his political questioning of the uses of and mechanisms for documentary records, with photography playing a core role. The exhibition 'Monumentmaschine' ['Machine Monument'] at the José Guerrero Centre in Granada (2014) is a highlight of his career as an artist. Highlights of his writing career include his publications Efecto real. Debates posmodernos sobre fotografía (2004) and Historias de la fotografía española. Escritos, 1977-2004 (2009). His most important work as a curator is in the thesis expositions Processos documentals. Imatge testimonial, subalternitat i esfera pública (La Capella, 2001), Una luz dura, sin compasión. El movimiento de la fotografía obrera, 1926- 1939 (MNCARS, 2011) and Aún no (MNCARS, 2015).

In his output as an artist, Ribalta uses small, analogue photographs, mostly in black and white. Each separate image is meaningful only as part of a set of photos with juxtaposed semantic features. He thus draws up a simile with the setting up of an exhibition as the translation and interpretation of images in a choral sense, and film montages: 'Photography is part of things. It is a fossil, but the montage brings the images into relation with one another and returns them to life. This montage of images hints at the illusion of movement produced in film. Placing images together involves not only linking the different processes and tasks shown and making them legible, but also setting the images themselves in motion. Giving life to stones is creating an illusion of movement'.

Ribalta has staged solo exhibitions at the University of Salamanca (2006), the José Guerrero Centre (Granada, 2015) and the Helga de Alvear Foundation (Cáceres, 2015).

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.