Malaga,
The photographic funds of José Luis Soler Vila, who created the Fundació Per Amor to L’Art and the Pumpas Gens Arte Center, recently deceased, have so far nourished two samples in the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga: one dedicated to the images of nudes and plants of Imogen Cunningham and another focused on Japanese photography developed between the fifty and seventies.
The third will open its doors to the public, explore the American documentary photography and expand its chronological arch: it will host fifty dated work between thirty and eighty by Cunningham itself, Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Anthony Hernández, Helen Levitt, Susan Meiselas, Susan Meiselas, Tod Papageorge and Garry Winogrand.
All of them made the image with a registration purpose of the axis of their trajectories, even if they chose to turn into some aspects of their street findings: childhood, changing society, the denunciation of injustice. And they tried to apply a direct look on their issues, so that the weight of the real impact on the viewer without requiring original or aesthetic frames accentuated, even though at certain times of their careers these authors do not escape the search for beauty.
The tour begins, how could it be otherwise, with the generation of the pioneers, of which Walker Evans, Robert Frank or Louis Faurer were part. Evans, after experimenting with abstract urban visions at the end of the twenties and study the way in which it related to its surroundings.
In 1935, the Farm Security Administration, a government agency, recruited it to visually witness the situation of farmers during the great depression; The fruit of that project was the photolibro Let’s praise now famous men (1941), with James Agee texts.
As for Frank and Faurer, they shared study and interest in the psychology of the subjects to whom they photographed (it is strange to call them models). Above all, they were fixed in the vulnerable solitude of individuals mired in crowds, but they did not leave aside the care of the formal aspect of their compositions.
In the beginning, Frank was influenced by his mentor Evans, but ended up distanceing himself from him to dive into matters that in the fifties did not deserve the attention of too many photographers, although over time they would end up becoming essential in the study of American daily life: that loneliness, silence, consumerism, racism, the alienation of the urban individual or love. And, in the examination of post -war modes in the United States, he reflected topics and paradoxes in his essential The Americans And he traveled from photography to the cinema. As for Faurer, attracted by the agitation that began to sprout around Times Square after World War II, he moved to New York in 1947. He was not interested They never posed, but were portrayed without preparation or mercy.
These were years in which projects such as Photo League were settled in the United States, composed of photographers and filmmakers who considered the report as a means of social complaint that had to be honest and direct and bring their focus to the popular classes, both urban and rural. In that environment he began working Helen Levitt, in the populous areas of New York, making his own moments of everyday life, moments in Banal Appearance that became metaphoricals of a time and a place. He usually offered suspended movements, instant and expressive scenes, captured from a humanistic perspective.
The average and anonymous American, portrayed in ephemeral seconds, was also very relevant in the production of Callahan, which began in the photo under the influence of Anselm Adams and would soon be recognized by Moholy-Nagy. He constantly innovated, looking for his images to offer unpublished visions of the real. Their explanations were as elegant and concise as their works: It is the issue that counts. I am interested in showing the issue in a new way, in order to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment (And this is the crux of the matter) that people cannot always see.
Faced with the apparent simplicity of his creations, Garry Winogrand achieved epatar (his is Marilyn Monroe’s stamp in Temptation lives up that gives image to this exhibition). When accounting for American society in the second half of the twentieth century, he knew how to express his joy and disenchantment, his movement and his doubt, in the difficult years of the cold war.
In the sixties we can appreciate a more subjective documentary, whose greatest architect was Lee Friedlander. He defined the object of his work as “the American social landscape”, but his approach went beyond the documentary registration: it is not that he was not interested in collective problems, but in rooms, natures, faces or shop windows seemed to want to know more about himself and his time, without the claim to surprise us but achieve him.
At that time, various styles lived, with the common link of the cultivation of spontaneous street portrait, theme capable of matched Imogen Cunningham, defender of a clear and crisp photograph, of very diverse reasons, characterized by a wide depth of field, with Tod Papageorge (1940), who displayed an attractive vision of the color of the New York country Studio 54.
Already in the first seventy, the then very young Susan Meiselas undertook an ambitious and sordid project for five summers: it was called Carnival strippers and would become a visual reference for women’s rights. The snapshots of this author were taken with a Leica camera without flash or tripod and try to get closest to the vital perspective of those strippers, although the male public has a constant presence in them.
It also constitutes a referential episode the series Rodeo Drive (1984) by Anthony Hernández, a large frieze from Ricos and Fashion Victims letting himself be seen by Beverly Hills. Slightly overexted the images to accentuate the color and offered in them a social critical evening for racial and class inequality. In its epilogue, embarked on those eighties, the exhibition collects works of the aforementioned and already very veteran Harry Callahan, in which the multiple exhibition was used, a technique that used early in the forties.
There are two paths that allow the sample to be traced in that half century: the evolution of American popular culture and that of documentary photography, in the latter case in the heat of the consolidation of enlightened magazines. The press would favor the development of the series: the photos ordered and grouped to configure a certain story open to history, the street, psychological and sociological research, complaint, irony or narration.
“American People. American documentary photography (1930-1980)”
Carmen Thyssen Museum
C/ Company, 10
Malaga
From July 16 to October 13, 2025
