In parallel to the White exhibition, the center also hosts the exhibition Tusquets de Cabirol. Eloquent Form, featuring the recovered work of chemist and amateur photographer Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol (Barcelona, 1904-1979). His negatives were found in the street in 2004 in Mallorca without any attribution, and for years work was done to identify the author. Beyond their aesthetic and technical value, the images have "great documentary value" according to the curators, Marina Balagué and Arola Valls.The exhibition is organized into four areas, showcasing Tusquets' photographs of Barcelona, various points along the Catalan coast, and others from rural areas. The fourth section is dedicated to works of a more abstract nature. "The images primarily show a society in the process of reconstruction after the Civil War: images of port workers, people working in the fields, strollers in the cities, and also of bourgeois life," says Vall. "It is a very plural and multifaceted vision of society at that time – she adds – which explains to us in a somewhat veiled way the vicissitudes of society at that time and also of photographic practice itself, because in that context photographers could venture into social critique."
Minor White: the great hidden talent of 20th century photography comes to light
The Kbr center dedicates to it the most ambitious exhibition in Europe, with 250 photographs
'Minor White'
- KBr Centre of Photography of the Mapfre Foundation. Av. del Litoral, 30, Barcelona. Until September 6.
The photographs of the North American Minor White (1908-1976) are like strips of his skin. "All his work is very personal," explains Carlos Gollonet, the photography curator at the Mapfre Foundation and curator of the exhibition of the photographer that can be seen at the KBr center until September 6. "In his photographs it is impossible to discover what his feelings were, but they are nonetheless permeated by his way of transmitting emotions and of making the viewer a participant in his vision of photography, which goes beyond what is seen in the photographed image – explains Gollonet–. At that time it was very innovative that he left a space for the viewer to complete the photograph with their emotions, memories, and experiences."
The exhibition is the most ambitious dedicated to White in the European context. Around 250 period copies can be seen, of which about 160 are organized into twelve sequences, one of the distinctive features of his work. The majority of the exhibited works come from Princeton University, which holds his archive. Many were unpublished in Europe and there is one, The Temptations of Saint Anthony, which had only been exhibited once. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has lent the only existing copy of the sequence Intimations of Disaster, the only one made by White himself, a small selection of the thousands of photographs he took on the streets of San Francisco. "The sequence is the most important part of his career, the most innovative contribution to 20th-century photography," says Gollonet.
One of the great names of formalism
For Gollonet, White is one of the great representatives of photographic formalism. Due to the importance of his work, he should be better known than other artists such as Edward Waston and Walker Evans. If White remained rather hidden for years, it is partly because at the time there were no photography galleries yet and because he earned his living mainly as a professor, not as a reporter. "Formalism is one of the least successful trends of the 20th century. It began with Stieglitz and practically ended with White's generation, with other names such as Siskind and Callahan," points out Gollonet. White began his training in botany and the arts and wrote poetry from a very young age. In the late 1930s he dedicated himself fully to photography, and during the 1940s he consolidated his dual profile as a photographer and teacher. He was a professor at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, a key institution for the renewal of photographic education in the United States, and in 1965 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). White was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture, and directed it for more than two decades. Before dedicating himself to photography, White made sequences of poems. "A poem, or later a photograph, did not express everything he wanted to say, which is why he used seriality – Gollonet points out –. In poetry he found a versatility that photography did not give him and he could make his contradictions evident in a less direct way". Turn frustration into beauty
White built a great body of work despite the frustration and crises caused by hiding his homosexuality. "When he realized his family had read his diary, in which he acknowledged his homosexuality, he wrote on those same pages that it was very hard to know that from that moment on he would live his whole life in a lie," says Gollonet. White tried to alleviate that pain as best he could, and photography was often a tool for healing. During World War II he converted to Catholicism, and every reading that struck him he turned into photographic theory. For example, The Sound of One Hand (1960) is the result of the influence of Zen Buddhism, while an essay by the actor and theater pedagogue Richard Boleslavsky made him consider how to express his emotions. And he even experimented with LSD and hypnotism.
The exhibition's route is organized chronologically based on the four places where White lived throughout his life: Portland, San Francisco, Rochester, and Boston. Among his early milestones is a set of details of Pittsburgh neighborhoods that were to disappear due to the city's urban and industrial transformation, the result of a commission from the city council. And between one sequence and another, some of his magnificent male nudes can be seen, in some cases of men who were his partners.
The highlight comes in the final stretch with the Totemic sequence (1974) composed of ten photographs of details of rocks and other natural elements that White had taken in Schoodic (Maine) between 1969 and 1970. "You can see how he used the same photograph with different levels of sunlight incidence. It is a work that has almost more to do with cinema and music," says Gollonet. The exhibition is part of the program from the PhotoEspaña festival and, after Barcelona, it can be seen at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid from September 24.