La Jornada: They recover a visual history of the Spanish civil war

The catalog Echoes of memory (published this year by Editorial RM) explores the production in the recent quarter of a century of photographers for whom the Spanish Civil War, although they did not experience it directly, impacted them as “the inheritance of a traumatic past that resonates in their bodies and in their images.”

The publication, made up of two books, is designed “like a memory device. It reads like a book of books,” according to the art texts label, which also describes it as a “catalog that breathes like a photobook.”

The title, curated by professor and researcher Marta Martín Núñez, has as its principle to begin the recovery of “a silenced memory that previous generations could not or did not want to express.”

By bringing together more than 120 catalogues, photographic books and photobooks, Echoes of memory It is a reference work that combines photography, memory studies, visual culture and contemporary history, enriched by talks with specialists.

The visual ensemble, rather than reconstructing the past, has the purpose of talking about the present and how the echoes of the war remain.

Forty creators

It features images and texts by more than 40 artists, historians, photographers and filmmakers, including Roberto Aguirrezabala, Art al Quadrat, Clemente Bernad, Lucía Boned, Susana Cabañero, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Miquel González, Anna Jornet, Martí Llorens, Xurxo Lobato, Salomé Moltó, Ana Teresa Ortega, Espe Pons, Paco Rangel, Queralt Solé and Javier Viver.

The edition emanates from the Photographic Memory Archive of the Civil War, born in March 2023 and located in the library of the Universitat Jaume I.

The collection focuses on photographic publications published since 1999 on that topic.

Directed by Marta Martín Núñez, the archive includes exhibition catalogues, research by the authors or civil society published as photographic books, usually of a documentary nature, and others are investigations of an essayistic nature captured in photobooks.

It is the first collection whose objective is to gather, catalogue, analyze and make visible the photographic material that recovers the memory of the conflict and the victims through research and artistic creation.

The file can be consulted online on the page www.memoriafotograficadelaguerracivil.uji.es. It led to the exhibition Echoes of memory: Photobooks of the present, which has had exhibitions, since 2023, in Castellón and Barcelona.

Map needed

The digital magazine Nailing, specialized in photography, reported that with the Civil War Photographic Memory Archive, “drawing a complete map of memory photography has allowed us to observe some patterns and also changes.

“Martín Núñez’s research points out how after 20 years of memorialization, a second generation of grandsons and granddaughters is emerging who not only show a silenced memory, but also question and interrogate it to try to understand it.”

The publication stated that the photobooks launched since 2019 “leave behind the classic documentaryism that had predominated and look for other languages ​​that point out the holes in memory” and call for collective processes due to their call for “the active participation of the public to finish building them.”