Starting in 1936, Life magazine launched a second era to give life to a new project largely oriented towards photojournalism. Life is considered the first large-circulation publication. A publication that broke all the schemes of the time given that, unlike what was usual until then, it began to be financed through advertising: a third of the images it contained were advertisements. The first issue of the revamped header opted for a very deliberate cover, the image of a newborn with a caption that read: life begins.
[subscribe_newsletter_esp]
And it is no coincidence given that, perhaps not in a determined way but certainly in an undetermined way, for life, for everyone's life, the appearance of photography as a subject that feeds the perception of the past, represents a before and after. Through photography we incorporate a new way of seeing and understanding existence. With photography, life becomes serial, unconnected and independent particles that atomize and control, and can even opaquely show reality. Photography represents the opposite of flowing. It sculpts mystery into the captured moment. But what was photography when there was no photography? The first things that come to mind are engraving, drawing, painting... According to art critic John Berger, photography before photography was memory. Berger argues this by stating that the camera isolates a series of appearances from the inevitable sequence of time and keeps them intact. Before the camera there was no instrument that could achieve such a purpose, except for our imagination in its faculty of memory. (Understanding a Photograph. John Berger. Ed. Gustavo Gili, 2016).
Is it possible to affirm that photography narrates nothing by itself? Is it possible that photography has only the exclusive function of preserving the instant? The answer is complex. It is surely halfway, determined by the degree of ripeness of the one who shoots.The writer and artist Susan Sontag qualifies and adds that, just as memory preserves the meaning of isolated appearances, photography, on the other hand, does not. Photography offers isolated appearances but without meaning. Meaning is the result of understanding functions, and functions take place in time and must be explained in time. Only what can narrate can make us understand. (On Photography. Susan Sontag. Algaguara Editorial, 2005). Therefore, is it possible to affirm that photography narrates nothing by itself? Is it possible that photography has only the exclusive function of preserving the instant? The answer is complex. It surely lies halfway, determined by the degree of ripeness of the shooter, because if it is true that a good photograph relates to time more than to content, such skill, the art of longing for time, is learned far from academies.
In this sense, when looking for answers about the role of photography, Susan Sontag shed light on one of the truths that, it is possible, the enthusiasm for the result may have made go unnoticed: the camera has been a fundamental tool for the supply of entertainment, and entertainment aims to stimulate consumption and anesthetize capitalist society. In counterpoint to this view, photographer and activist Sebastião Salgado sees abundant hope in photography. And photographer Martine Franck, also within the field of answers, assures that the bewilderment that a photograph can arouse is similar, in terms of intensity, to what could be a fragment of happiness. So, what makes one photo just any photo and another categorized as famous? We seek the answer by conversing with the protagonists of three lines of author photography in Barcelona.
David Pujadó and essential photography
David Pujadó was fired from his job ten years ago. After a frustrated trip to Hong Kong, he arrived in London, where he bought an analog camera and spent seven to eight hours a day taking snapshots. Later, in Berlin, with an Irish photographer, he shared impressions about the results of the two or three rolls of film he shot per day. In this way, by training his eyes observing hundreds of photographs and visiting as many exhibitions as possible, he made a place for himself in the photographic universe. Despite considering himself an art enthusiast, surrounded by a family of sculptors and a writer sister, David does not feel like a camera genius ---despite the numerous catalog of distinctions and awards obtained--- and, once settled in Belgrade, he decided to take advantage of his entrepreneurial skills and promote a series of projects related to authorial photography.
For David, photography is a method of self-therapy. When I shoot, in reality, I am self-portraying, whether it's objects or working on almost fashion-like edits; I reveal myself. With David, it is difficult to find answers about photography given that, precisely, he conceives it as a way to provoke questions. A method to suggest stories that the viewer concludes. He explains that in one of the first exhibitions he promoted in Belgrade, titled Fragments, at the doors of the inauguration, he removed the titles of the photographs so that they would not interfere with the visitor's interpretation. The questions David poses through photography interrogate about decadence, melancholy, and solitude. He likes to position himself between simplicity and silence, like someone setting a trap to catch the souls he portrays. He is currently the director of the Belgrade Photo Month Festival, and promoter of Бартcелона Koncept (Barcelona Concept) and Бартcелона pop-up, a photographic gallery limited to nine pieces and set up in room 147 of the Radisson Collection Hotel in Belgrade.
Albert Gusi and neuronal photography
Albert Gusi is a visual artist. In Albert's photography, landscape and humor act as axes. He is the director of Grisart, International School of Photography of Barcelona and director of the Panoràmic Festival. Albert states that he begins to get answers when, paradoxically, he moves away from the instrument, because the context, the creative possibilities that photography offers today are a network of neural connections that go beyond what the camera can offer. The camera is overrated if it is only considered as a tool to capture the moment. For Albert, the landscape becomes a canvas, and photography is tasked with inviting an interpretation where nothing is accidental. In Albert Gusi's proposals, the transformation of the landscape transcends the natural course.
It is a way of explaining that, in our era, it is viable to provoke, capture and disseminate a visual proposal in a matter of hours or minutes for the entire planet. The image, he states, moves in people's pockets at an unthinkable speed. And this fact has changed photography. An example is the appearance of Instagram, which as a channel has hit the course of advertising photography, transforming it into ephemeral messages. Today's photography, Albert states, no longer wants or can be an answer because it anticipates any question, and an image captured with a mobile can become the cover of the New York Times.
Espe Pons and dreamlike photography
At the beginning of the 1987-88 academic year, Espe Pons was around fourteen years old. She was in the drawing classroom when her teacher suggested she leave high school and take the leap to study photography. And so she did, although her entry into the cosmos of image happened gradually. It is with the final project of the Groc school of plastic arts and design, a work about the world of the circus, that Espe connects with the coordinates of her own style: movement and blur in close-ups. Time, the maturation process of her photography, leads her to delve into the territory of landscape and memory to, through these captures, extract the inner fog. In this way, through the fog, she suggests dreamlike, dream universes. Like when we unravel hope. Just as when we evoke remembrance and memory, a tool Espe uses to reconstruct history from a truth that declassifies anonymous witnesses.
In Portraits, a project developed during a stay in Beijing, the photographer reflects on the control society we live in. Frontal photographs and locations that place the viewer before an impenetrable surface.
And in her latest project, she presents a photographic essay on the memory of her grandfather's brother. In Sota la llum del mar, Espe follows the footsteps of Tomàs, shot in 1941 when he was only thirty-one years old. With this project, exhibited at the Vila Casas Foundation, Espe consolidates a challenge: to make silence heard.
A story becomes a narrative when the ending is revealed. Then, if we did it this way, if we started from the end, perhaps we would solve the unknown about the truth to which photography subjects us. But this is impossible, because the answer will always be narrower or wider than reality. And, above all, more dramatic.