Portraying a Society in Search of Freedom

To emancipate oneself is to stop living under imposed rules or order. To begin to decide what you want to be, how you want to express yourself and, above all, from where you want to look. A gesture of freedom that can be individual, but also collective: a society that breaks with the strict rules that have governed it or when an artistic practice begins to question the functions traditionally assigned to it and seeks new forms of expression. Spanish photography experienced precisely these three processes simultaneously: individual, collective and artistic.

It is this triple transformation that runs through Emancipations, a new look at the photographs that are already part of the Foto Colectania collection, but now read from the perspective of Florian Ebner, head of the Photography Department at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. On the one hand, the exhibition explains how Spanish society progressively left behind the rules that had marked much of the 20th century and embarked on a path towards modernity after the Second World War and, above all, with the end of Francoism. On the other hand, it follows the emancipation of photography itself: a medium that also progressively left behind its primarily informative function to explore new forms of expression, with more ambitious and artistic images. A journey that includes works by photographers such as Colita, Joan Colom, Joan Fontcuberta or Pilar Aymerich, among others, to explain how the way of looking at and representing the world also changed.