Two women after a bombing, Poble-Sec, Barcelona, March 14, 1937
The red box in this story did not contain chocolates, it contained hundreds of unpublished photographs of a period of our history, that of the Civil War, about which we often think that we can no longer tell more, but about which we always end up discovering some new edge. In this case, it comes in the form of Images by photographer Antoni Campañà and many of them can be seen in the exhibition infinity war that he National Museum of Art of Catalonia welcomes up the July 18.
During the war, Campañà clung to his camera to survive. Portray what was happening as a way to stay on your feet in a world that was falling apart. Without self-censorship. No concessions to either side.
Barricade. Hospital Street, Barcelona, July 25, 1936
By over 5,000 images militia women, refugees who arrived from Malaga to Barcelona in 1937, the ruins left by the bombings, Durruti's burial, the exhibition of the mummies of the Salesas nuns on the Paseo de Sant Joan, the withdrawal of the republican army or Franco parades.
When the putschists won and ended the war, the photographer took hundreds of these images and put them in the red box, where they remained hidden until the family found them in 2018, almost 30 years after his death.
Now, the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya brings together more than 300 photographs of Campañà in The Infinite War, a large number of them unpublished (not even the author himself had printed them) and all of great artistic quality and historical relevance.
The exhibition will cover different facets of the photographer, although it will focus primarily on the work he did during the Civil War. Most of the images come from Campañà family fund, which has made a deposit to the museum of 63 photographs from the pictorialist stage prior to the conflict.
Post-bombing chaos, Barceloneta, Barcelona, May 29, 1937
And it is that when Campañà began in photography, he stood out for his pictorialist work, a facet for which he was awarded worldwide and which was already part of the museum's own collection as a representative of Catalan pictorialism.
Diagonals, chopped and daring frames they become his allies to capture reality, becoming the work of him faster and more direct when he had to portray the horror of the Civil War.
Refugees from Malaga at the Montjuïc stadium, February 1937