"Beauty in a city like Madrid is in what happens in the blink of an eye, in the inflection of a look or a gesture, in a compositional harmony that has only come into being because it is captured by a photographer, but that otherwise it would disappear without trace. In Madrid there is almost no landscape other than the human landscape, which is the privileged territory of photography."
The writer Antonio Muñoz Molina defines with these words, in the prologue of the book Madrid, one of the characteristics of this city. Madrid is the sum of the fragments or indications of the stories that compose it, starring anonymous characters who in turn become the primary subjects of street photography.
The 160 images in this book are structured into six time periods that run between 1900 and 2020.
Between 1900 and 1930, Madrid entered a new century with the aim of becoming a great metropolis in the style of the great European capitals. With the inauguration of the metro in 1919 and the Gran Vía, Madrid is developing a new personality captured by authors such as Alfonso, Francisco Goñi, Luis Ramón Marín and António Passaporte.
The cultural and intellectual flourishing of the Second Republic and the harsh replica of the destruction brought about by the Civil War are brought together in the chapter dedicated to the period between 1931 and 1939, with images by authors such as Henri Cartier - Bresson, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.
Between 1940 and 1960, great Spanish photographers such as Ramón Masats, Francesc Catalá - Roca, Paco Gómez, César Lucas, or Campúa witnessed the reconstruction of a city that was struggling to get ahead, full of inequalities and with a population growing due to migration From the countryside to the city. An evolution of also caught the attention of foreign photographers such as William Klein or Cas Oorthuys.
Between 1961 and 1976, Spain struggled to open up to the world with a light and attractive image that put the rigid seams of the dictatorship in the background. Photographers such as Gianni Ferrari, Joana Biarnes, Henry Clarke, Raymind Depardon or Gonzalo Juanes, portrayed Hollywod figures and mass phenomena like the Beatles, living the night and populating the streets of a city that exudes glamor and the desire to open up to the world.
Franco's death brought with it one of the most effervescent movements in Madrid culture, the Movida. A period of openness and experimentation that authors such as Alberto García - Alix, Pablo Pérez Mínguez, Miguel Trillo or Ouka Leele knew how to capture like nobody else and whose images are collected in the period between 1977 and 1991 of the book.
The last period included in the book, between 1992 and 2020, brings together images of a city that has been definitively transformed into a metropolis. A multicultural and cosmopolitan capital with an undeniable cultural offer and its own personality that places Madrid in the international spotlight.
This volume brings together views of very diverse authors: from the great photographs of Alfonso, perhaps the greatest graphic chronicler of Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century; to the prewar and war images of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro; the postwar portrait of William Klein, Francesc Català-Roca, Ramón Masats, Inge Morath or Cas Oorthyus; the incipient development society that photographers from here and abroad such as Gianni Ferrari, Ferdinando Scianna or Joana Biarnés immortalized; the mythical images of the Madrid Movida by Alberto García-Alix, Miguel Trillo, Ouka Leele or Pablo Pérez Mínguez; and the cultural, social and economic environment of the 21st century from the perspective of Cristina García Rodero, Alex Webb or Thomas Struth.
