English
On the 6th of October, the exhibition ´Orden y Desorden´ by the self-taught photographer Paco Gómez will be inaugurated in the Foto Colectania Foundation in Barcelona. The exhibition has the title of the book that Laura Torré edited on the work of this photographer, known for capturing simple images of the second half of the 20th century in Spain.
TH exhibition commissioned by Torré, who investigated exhaustively the work of Paco Gómez, is composed by 75 images that were selected from an archive of 25,000 negatives and 1,000 original photographs. From them, most are in black and white. The archive was given by the heirs to the Foto Colectania Foundation for its custody and preservation.
The Foundation has coedited with Editorial RM a version of the book ´Orden y Desorden´ which can be found in bookshops in Spain and around the world.
Paco Gómez was born in Pamplona in 1918. His initiation in photography was early, however, in 1956 he joined the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid and began to be known for his thesis on the role of photography and the photographer. These were the times of the Franco dictatorship and large part of the photographers who had made a political militance out of their job were in exile, which meant a violent rupture in the continuity of the aesthetic discussions previous to the Spanish Civil War, from there that the thesis on the aesthetic considerations in photography that surrounded Gómez from the La Palangana Group were a novelty.
Gómez had been the founder of La Palangana and he criticised the conservative nature of photography which predominated in Spain and, together with Ramón Masat, Gabriel Cualladó and Gerardo Vielba among others, they began works with the emphasis on social topics, close to neorealism that permeated cinematography, turning the ugly and decadent into works of magnificent beauty.
His attempt to try to capture the time of Spain being poor, conservative and deeply affected by the war, the dictatorship and the social divisions is highly achieved. Gómez doesn´t look for a political leaflet, he doesn´t expect to change the world with them or influence anyone by looking at them. He just looks for a photograph that captures reality and he does so majestically, and that´s the sign of a true artist.
His permanent evolution brought him to subjective photography and he dedicated himself to photography and architecture, interiors and ruins. Maybe what impacts the most about his photography is the feeling of despair that each of them has. It´s like if he captured the feeling of a society destroyed by the pain that death and defeat had left them.
This great exhibition is a great tribute to a lesser known photographer, despite that it pours clearly the memory of Spain from the end of the 50s and the 80s in the 20th century.
For more information: http://www.colectania.es/index.php?i=1&p=2&s=3
Nancy Guzman
If you have planned to come and spend a few days of emotions and fun in apartments in Barcelona we inform you that this will be open until January 2012.
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
