The renowned art center of the Spanish capital, which is contesting the leading role with the famous Prado Museum, unwinds an exciting topic from times long past with “Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848-1917”.
The exhibition explores the historical background of documentary photography in the revolutions between these years in seven rooms.
Although the birth of documentary film as an artistic genre itself dates back to the 1920s, the exhibition’s curator, Jorge Ribalta, argued that “it can be affirmed with hindsight that the documentary function is as old as photography itself”.
The exhibition is an anthology and brings together more than 500 works – including albums, publications and daguerreotypes – on themes related to the proletarian classes, urban reforms, popular uprisings or projects of social denunciation.
Ribalta pointed out that exclusive graphics and documents from the most prestigious museums in Paris, New York, Washington, Munich, Berlin, London and Madrid, among others, will also be added.
In the different sections of the tour you can see images of workers at work or of famous people such as Robert P. Napper’s Andalusian characters; The Streets of Paris, by Charles Nègre; Adamson and Hill’s series of Newhaven fishermen; the miners by George Bretz and the crowd of canal workers by Elizabeth II, in views by Charles Clifford.
According to Manolo Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía, the research carried out in this exhibition completes a cycle that began in 2010 with the exhibition on the movement of worker photography from the interwar period.
Among the many surprises appear the cities and the great urban reforms of the moment, such as Vienna by Ferdinand Ritter von Staudenheim and the works of Via Laietana in Barcelona.
(taken from orb)