“If a photograph doesn’t explain something, it’s better that you don’t take it. And when I frame, if I don’t ‘see’ the photo, I don’t shoot.” This has been one of the maxims that Pilar Aymerich (Barcelona, 1943) has followed throughout her professional career. An enormous career, which is collected Now in the exhibition that opens this afternoon at the Lonja Zaragoza, ‘Memory lived’ – it is difficult to find a more accurate title for what is presented – brings together 154 images taken by the Catalan photographer over more than five decades.
Aymerich has been classified, somewhat hastily, as a ‘photographer of the Transition’ in Catalonia. But she is much more. And that has been the will of Neus Miró, the curator of the exhibition, who has made an effort to make known all the facets of her work. “We wanted to expand that temporal spectrum, both towards the past and towards the present. She trained at the Adrià Gual School of Dramatic Art in Barcelona, and that explains a lot about her work, her care for the scenography in each image, her interest in presenting us the main actor, the supporting actors… He incorporates that theatricality into his work organically,” Miró pointed out this Thursday.
Aymerich discovered photography in London, where he had traveled, after passing through France, to study theater direction. “I had never been interested in photography,” he confessed when presenting his exhibition. “But I am a person who lives by intuition and my life hasn’t gone too badly. I was very lost and there was a moment when I thought about photography intuitively. I came to it to survive. I wrote from London to my father asking him to send me a camera and he sent me a small Voigtländer. To take photographs the camera doesn’t matter, what matters is what you have in your head. Jean-Luc Godard said that “framing is a question of morality.” And he was right, with the framing you imply what you want to explain. And with that little Voigtländer (present in the exhibition) I started taking photographs.” It was the London of the miniskirt, of the Rolling and the Beatles, and of the social and political protests. That rebellious London is the one that I would later recover in Barcelona when She resettled there in 1968 and began to be a witness, and photographer, of the Transition.
‘Pilar Aymerich. Vivid memory ‘intelligently proposes several dialogues in her journey: that of theatrical photography in Barcelona versus that of London; the formation of social movements in both cities; the portraits of her… Aymerich had the privilege of portraying the cultural life of her city over several decades, on a spectrum that goes from Josep Pla to Ovidi Montllor, passing through the chaotic and unclassifiable Joan Brossa. “When you want to portray, you aspire to explain to a person -pointed out the photographer-, and that is why I have always sought to gain the trust of the sitter, to work in their environment.” These photos from the 60s and 70s, in rigorous black and white, contrast enormously with the block that closes the exhibition, already in color, of anonymous women whom he has captured frontally. The portrait that has impressed him the most is one he made of three Catalans who had survived the Mauthausen concentration camp. “One day Montserrat Roig called me to urgently come to her house. because I was interviewing them there for a book I was working on. I found them all sitting at a table and I didn’t want to take their photo there. I walked around the house and found a wall. I asked them if they could stand together, like when they were made to line up in the concentration camp. And it was impressive how their faces changed. The pain arose, and it appears in the photo.”
In addition to these dialogues, the exhibition includes two ‘islands’ that show other facets of the author. One of them is a room where the short film ‘Entreacto’ is presented, shot in 1974 in 35 millimeters and where Pilar Aymerich acts as actress. And the other is made up of images taken in Cuba in 1982 (all in color) or for her project ‘Viajeras a La Habana’ in collaboration with the historian Isabel Segura.
In short, an exciting journey through the work of a creator who in 2021 was honored with the National Photography Award, which she received in Zaragoza. ‘Lived memory’, which is the first major retrospective dedicated to Aymerich’s work, It can be visited until September 8 and is included in the official program of PhotoEspaña 2024. which this year includes 84 exhibitions in various Spanish cities. Next week the exhibition ‘Fantastic Anthropology’, by Lucía Herrero, will open at the DKV Tower.
