When I like TV3 the most is when it premieres documentaries like La capsa vermella: les fotografies amagades de la Guerra Civil (Sense ficció, June 2, 2021), a magnificent work by Plàcid Garcia-Planas, Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta and Toni Monné. The documentary explains the discovery of nearly 5,000 photographs of the Civil War that their author, photographer Antoni Campañà, hid in two red boxes and how, eighty years later, they come to light for the first time.
It traces Campañà's fascinating professional and personal trajectory based on the testimony of family members and photography experts, as well as moving home recordings made by the photographer himself. Campañà had an Oscar-worthy life and, for that alone, it is worth having seen La capsa vermella: les fotografies amagades de la Guerra Civil. If you missed it, you will find the documentary uploaded on the TV3 website.
If after watching it you want to know more, you are in luck. The documentary, in fact, complements the exhibition La guerra infinita. Antoni Campañà, which can be seen at the MNAC until July 18, and is based on the book La capsa vermella, published by Comanegra a couple of years ago, which reproduces some of his best photos.
Why did Campañà decide to hide his thousands of war photographs in two red boxes that for decades remained forgotten at the bottom of the garage of the house he had in Sant Cugat del Vallès? What would he have thought if, finally, all those snapshots of the Civil War that he had decided to hide forever came to light? The documentary tries to answer these two big questions. In any case, as a society, we must be grateful that the family saved the red boxes in extremis, when the property was about to be sold and subsequently demolished, and that they decided that their content had to be made public.
Why did Campañà decide to hide his thousands of war photographs in two red boxes that for decades remained forgotten at the bottom of the garage of the house he had in Sant Cugat del Vallès?"Coincidentally, the day after watching Campañà's documentary, something very curious happened to me.I was walking through the Eixample and noticed that someone had abandoned an old photograph of a couple of lovers right next to the garbage containers. I felt sorry. I thought this must be the fate of all those memories that are no longer worth anything to anyone.Perhaps because it seemed to me a small injustice that needed to be publicly denounced, I decided to take a photo of that abandoned portrait on the sidewalk and immediately shared it on Twitter.To my surprise, the tweet quickly went viral, with more than eighteen hundred shares, and received more than two hundred comments that I read and, for the most part, answered.
Many people expressed their sadness that a photograph like that would end up on the street and wondered what would happen to their own family photos when they were no longer around. Others observed that this would no longer happen to new generations because they hardly have any paper photographs. More than one stated that, before their photographs and those of their ancestors end up in the trash or sold in the Encants, they prefer to burn them.
The first thing I thought was how lucky it was that Campañà did not decide to burn his great photographs at the time. Then, I asked myself: What should we do with photographs that no one wants? Where should all those albums full of family memories that have passed from generation to generation go?