BURGOS.- The Cultural Cordon Exhibition Hall in Burgos hosts, until August 25, "A Portable History of Photography. Lola Garrido's Collection", with more than one hundred images of sixty-three different authors belonging to the personal collection of Lola Garrido. In the exhibition are represented the great masters in the history of photography, from the mid-nineteenth century until the Decade of the nineties of the twentieth century. It is the first time that so large selection is made (so far has been showed fragmented or as part of thematic exhibitions) with the intention of addressing the practical totality of the history of the photography, through the most representative authors. The exhibition has been produced by Caja de Burgos and coordinated by diChroma photography.
The broad list of photographers include pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; the great European and American authors from the 20s and 30s like André Kertész, Lotte Jacobi, Alexander Rodchenko or Lee Miller; the essentials of photo-story as Elliott Erwitt, William Klein, Garry Winogrand and Walker Evans; avant-garde creators such as Man Ray, René Magritte, Harold Edgerton and Raoul Hausmann; the famous fashion photographers Lillian Bassman, Irving Penn and Horst P. Horst, or the contemporary artists Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Cindy Sherman, Richard Misrach and Nan Goldin.
Many of the selected images are part of the contemporary visual memory. The work of Robert Capa "Death of a militiaman", in 1937, has become one of the most famous images of all time. The same can be said about "Migrant Mother", with which Dorothea Lange documented in 1936 the living conditions of rural America, or about the extraordinary montage of 1932 signed by Wanda Wulz entitled "I Cat", or the work of Bern Stern with the last photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe. The names of Robert Mapplethorpe, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Madame Yevondé or Inge Morath increase the extraordinary cast of authors of the exhibition.
Although the exhibition includes photographs dated from 1865 to 1993, the staging avoids deliberately a sequential presentation. Rather than gathering periods or movements more or less correlative, it suggest thematic relations and establish visual dialogues between the images themselves, regardless of its authorship or of the concrete moment of his capture.
Because of that, there's not closed issues in order to, around open concepts, that the spectator can explore similarities, parallels or, on the contrary, diversity and disagreement. The big areas that encourage to discover those sensory relationships include concepts such as abstraction and experimentation, a space in which there are many of the artistic poetics that the photography has witnessed, with works by Jürgen Klauke, Hanness Kilian and Harold Edgerton; the prominence of the face, gestures and the disturbing games of gazes in the snapshots of Norman Parkinson, Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Martin Munkacsi; the face and the body as a permanent attraction from the vision of Alfred Cheney Johnston and Madame D'Ora, Bill Brandt or Milton H. Greene; the presence of the city, both the building itself and the urban life which is housed in the snapshots of Robert Franck, Alfred Erhardt and Lucía Moholy-Nagy, and nature as eternal challenge - more spiritual than material - in the images of Alma Levenson or Josef Breitenbach.
Curator, Critic, Advisor and Director of foundations (including Foto Colectania), Lola Garrido has dedicated all her life to photography. Her extraordinary collection today comprises more than 700 images, and constitutes one of the most renowned international series, required frequently in different museums and institutions around the world.
