The untouchable drawer of Miquel Varderi

GironaThe best photographs by Miquel Varderi only had family and a few friends as a loyal audience. The slide projections in the dining room at home were a strict liturgy that included technical comments with mentions of the ISO or the aperture of the diaphragm. They were the fruit of a hobby that he had cultivated with an almost professional demand and with aesthetic criteria for which only the images that were up to the mark deserved to survive. “My father took photographs his whole life, everywhere and of everyone. Afterwards, he would make a meticulous selection and keep the ones he liked the most,” explains his daughter, Mònica Varderi. The chosen slides remained jealously guarded in an untouchable drawer, cataloged in boxes with labels with names such as "Girona", "Costa Brava", "Bullfighting", "Rugby" or "Types".

Now, almost four years after his death, that private gaze becomes public domain. His children, Mònica and Marc Varderi, have donated to the Girona City Council a collection of 3,783 photographs that become part of the collection of the Center for Image Research and Documentation (CRDI). They are mainly slides from the seventies and eighties and constitute an extraordinary visual testimony of the Girona regions of the second half of the 20th century.

Thoughtful and unique photos

David Iglésias, head of the Photographic and Audiovisual Documentation section of the Girona City Council and coordinator of the CRDI, acknowledges that the collection caught their attention immediately, “because it had very good images and followed very marked aesthetic criteria, surely influenced by the photographic competitions of the time, where a unique element was sought in each image”. They were photos “very well thought out, which left nothing to chance”. Some slides have been modified by the passage of time, with more magenta tones: “It is a new patina that sometimes confuses but also has an aesthetic value”.

The images can already be consulted online, although the collection is in the process of being cataloged. Its value lies not only in what they explain, but also in the way Varderi looked at it: an amateur photographer who did not take photos by commission or for publication, but because there were things that seemed to him worthy of being saved from oblivion.

Photography and sport

Born in Girona in 1930, Varderi had a professional life far removed from photography. As a young man, he worked in hotels on the Costa Brava and at the Vichy Catalan spa, environments that put him in contact with a more cosmopolitan society than the Girona of that time. In 1959, at only 29 years old, he embarked on an adventure that today seems almost cinematic: a trip by Vespa to England.

Later he would work as an administrative assistant at the construction company ECISA until its bankruptcy, at the beginning of the eighties. Subsequently, he passed civil service examinations and joined as a civil servant in the Department of Industry of the Generalitat in Girona, where he worked until his retirement. But, aside from work, there were two passions that accompanied him for decades: sports and photography.

His connection with the GEiEG was especially intense. He was an active member, swam daily at the Sant Ponç pool, and for years participated in the Banyoles Lake Crossing. He also faithfully followed the GEiEG rugby teams and the athletics races at the Devesa. And, camera in hand, he turned many of these sports settings into photographic material.

Aesthetic and documentary value

Rugby, athletics, and swimming occupy a prominent place within the collection. Varderi sought there, more than just the simple chronicle of a result, the movement, the effort, the tension of the body, the gesture frozen at the exact moment. His sports photography is also a photography of the human body.

This perspective is repeated in another of the archive's major sections: popular types and singular characters, likely influenced by the images of Foto Lux and Josep Esquirol. Fishermen, farmers, market vendors, and other anonymous figures appear alongside people and scenes that Varderi considered representative of a rapidly changing world. These are photographs that today acquire an unexpected documentary value: what for the photographer might have simply been a curious character or a picturesque scene, with the passage of time becomes a testament to a way of life.

Bulls and Girona

There is also the Old Girona and the Costa Brava, the festivals, the flower exhibitions, the social activities and the cultural events. And there are the bulls, another of his great photographic obsessions. At the bullfights in Girona, he specifically sought out formal beauty: the movement, the geometry, the light, the relationship between the bullfighter, the animal and the bullring.

The collection extends beyond the Girona regions. There are photographs of travels and of various towns in Catalonia and Spain, as well as other European countries. But the center of gravity is unequivocally from Girona: a city, some landscapes, and a society seen from the proximity of a man who knew them and who, at the same time, had the necessary curiosity to look at them as if he were discovering them.

Analog to the end

Varderi was a convinced analog photographer. He resisted digital photography until the end, faithful to certain cameras and a way of working in which he trained the skill of choosing the best moment for each snapshot. Technology, he thought, could not replace the gaze. This fidelity also explains the character of his archive: a collection of selected images, coherent and personal, built over the years without the pretension of ever becoming a public legacy.

“I kept the slides almost with suspicion. He never wanted them to leave the private sphere, but once our parents passed away, together with my brother we made the decision to donate them to the Girona City Council to keep them in the best conditions and make them accessible. I think it is the best tribute we can pay him,” explains Mònica Varderi. The incorporation into the CRDI turns this unique collection into searchable heritage.