SO FAR, SO CLOSE

Curator: Cristina Zelich.
Nº of works: 80 b&w photographies.
Availability: from February 2015.
Contact: Ana Berruguete.

Exhibition coproduce with Fundación Fotocolectania.

Artists: 70Koldo Chamorro, Cristina García Rodero, Cristóbal Hara, Fernando Herráez, Anna Turbau, Ramón Zabalza.
This exhibition surveys the work of leading exponents of documentary photography in Spain during the 1970’s. Key figures in Spanish photography who captured rural society, life in small provincial towns, marginial cultures, folk traditions and popular festivities, seen from a unique perspective far away from the stereotyped view.
The world they photographed bore little resemblance to the official iconography purveyed under Franco’s dictatorship through ilustrated magazines and tourist guides, wich drew heavily on the picturesque and offered an idealised vision of Spain.
Though heirs, in a sense, to the Humanist realism of an earlier generetaion of photographers, the approach adopted by the six photographers in this group show was different; they shunned Neorealist commonplaces; in their quest to observe and convey the world, their framing of shots at times contained echoes of magic realism; they were aware that the language of photography has its own characteristics and resources; and they were acutely conscious that they were recording ways of life and traditions which were soon to disappear or undergo radical change, and which highlighted the gulf between urban and rural society.