The curators Ramón Esparza, Jorge Ribalta, and Cristina Zelich, involved in different ways in carrying out several of the surveys that make up the exhibition, have carried out in-depth research on this topic. In his words.
"When we speak of surveys, we are not only referring to a series of photographic commissions, but to a context that is implicit to them: an institutional framework and a certain conception of photography within cultural policy."
The sequence of images is organized around three moments, the 1980s, the great urban transformations related to the events of 1992, and the first decade of the 21st century, the exhibition presents the work of almost seventy photographers together with the publications published in relationship with the eleven selected projects.-
- Granollers: 8 sight points (1983)
- L’Albufera. Tangential vision (1985)
- Vigovisións (1986-2000)
- Barcelona: virtual geography (1990)
- Seville x 15 (1991)
- Ría de Hierro (1993)
- Salamanca. A photographic project (2002)
- Revisiting the Canary Islands (2003)
- Eight Visions: District C (2007)
- Imatges metropolitanes de la nova Barcelona (2008)
- Destruction and construction of the territory. A memory of Spanish places (2008-2009)
The common nexus of all the works presented, apart from their object of interest, is that they are both public and private commissions, as in
‘Framed landscapes’, but focused on the registration of the landscape and the territory of our country. In some cases, they had not been shown to the public since its realization, which, in this way, is contributing to the dissemination of a rich heritage whose knowledge does not correspond at all to its relevance.
The first block corresponds to the first initiatives of the eighties. The first photographic commission in Spain was
Granollers: 8 sight points, in 1983, with the participation of local photographers from around Barcelona. In 1985 it was followed by a project on the Valencian Albufera, entitled
L’Albufera. Tangential vision, which had international participation. In 1986
Vigovisións started, which was held biennially through the Vigo Fotobienal until the year 2000 and in which photographers from all over the world participated.
The second block corresponds to 1992, the year of major events in the main Spanish capitals and their corresponding reforms. These transformed the physiognomy of cities like Barcelona, Seville, and Bilbao. They ushered in the new postmodern or post-industrial cultural economies. The commissions promoted from the Barcelona and Seville architectural colleges in 1990 and 1991 arose from the will to create documents of the radical urban transformation that the Olympic Games and the Universal Exposition represented, respectively. The 1993 Bilbao project also anticipated the major renovation operation, whose icon would be the Guggenheim Museum.
The third block corresponds to the 2000s and the expansion of new urban economies focused on culture and heritage. The five selected projects are relatively heterogeneous: the
Salamanca project in 2002 was part of the logic of the European cultural capital that the city assumed in that year.
Revisiting the Canary Islands, in 2003, sought to update the iconography of the islands through the participation of great names from the international art scene.
District C is a document of the emergence of a new technological neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid. The survey promoted by MACBA in Barcelona in 2007 was a debate on the state of the city and emerging trends after the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures. Finally,
Destruction and construction of the territory. A memory of Spanish places was an initiative on a national scale, arising from the university, which introduced the debate on sustainability and historical memory and, at the same time, the territorial debate. They are projects from the moment just before the global financial crisis that began in 2007, which created a new scenario and determined a change of era.
In short, the history of photographic surveys in contemporary Spain is the history of the institutions of national photographic culture and the history of the morphological-geographical evolution of territories and cities over thirty years, always depending on the logic of post-industrial economics and its politics.
The catalogue
Published by the ICO Foundation in collaboration with Editorial RM, the catalogue has a conversational format and highlights the eleven projects that, according to the curators,
"articulate a synthetic and historically significant account of the object of study". It also includes 29 fact sheets on 29 surveys, among which are the eleven mentioned above, 14 interviews with some of the curators, and three conversations with some of the photographers involved. Although the book and its format refer to
"an idea of work in progress, unfinished, and not intended to close the study", we there's no doubt that it will be an unavoidable reference for future research on the subject.
