An illustrated edition of the ‘Romancero gitano’ merges Lorca’s verses with 53 photographs from the Magnum agency

‘The Gypsy Romancero’by the poet Federico García Lorca, has just gone on sale in a Illustrated edition with 53 photographs from the Magnum agency. The work, edited by Jdej editors, is titled ‘Romancero gitano x magnum’.

This edition seeks “add to the beauty and charm of the verses of Federico García Lorcawhich overwhelm any scenario, the art and imagination of the greats of photography grouped in the Magnum Agencyawarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord in 2024″, as pointed out by the publisher.

“Photography, the image in general, and even more so this type of photography in particular, has enormous potential to dialogue with other artistic expressions such as music or literature,” adds its graphic editor, Cayetano Padilla, who emphasizes that, thanks to this alliance, “a new meaning is evoked in the eyes of the reader.”

When preparing this book, “two references of contemporary culture were chosen, such as Federico García Lorca and the archives of the Magnum Photos agency, which has several of the most prominent photographers in history”, which “would allow us to put together a book where its two hearts, the text and the images, could truly converse and interrelate as equals.“, which is why he has emphasized that the selected snapshots are not “irrelevant or unconnected with Lorca’s work.”

In this sense, Padillo emphasizes that ““The universality and eternal contemporaneity of the ‘Romancero gitano’ are intertwined in a particular way with the visual power of the Magnum archive.”so images that reflected “more closely the text” were included.

“I think that the main challenge of the book as an editor has been to maintain that tension between images and text, not to be too explicit or fall into very far-fetched approaches, which the experience of reading and viewing the images was fluid and understandable, but interesting and, at times, challenging for the reader“he specified.

Regarding the target audience, he has indicated that he hopes that “it will be an edition that will please many types of readers and that even the poetry reader, who in principle may not have a special interest in the world of photography, It will help you delve into a form of artistic expression and read photographic images that perhaps, in a world like today’s so saturated with visual elements, you had never stopped to think about.”

PHOTOS WITH “EMOTIONAL CHARGE” AND “ANOTHER NARRATIVE LEVEL”

Regarding the selected photographers, the book has works by Josef Koudelka, Nikos Economopoulos, Patrick Zachmann, Ferdinando Scianna or Cristina García Rodero, “authors who have photographs that seem in some cases taken to accompany Lorca’s stanzas, which sometimes seem like a visual extension of Lorca’s verses“.

Furthermore, Padilla has highlighted that Magnum’s photos “even though they are exceptional visually and technically at the same time, they carry a deep emotional charge that takes them to another narrative level.”

As for the “most difficult” poem to illustrate, he acknowledged that it was ‘Romance of the Spanish Civil Guard’. “It is a poem where Lorca proposes, on the one hand, a very specific scenario (a gypsy camp is dismantled by the Civil Guard at Christmas time) but everything takes place in an almost dreamlike framework, in a city without time.” “Reflecting these two aspects of a concrete reality and a fantasy envelope was undoubtedly a challenge.“, he assured.

In the same sense, he has stressed that ‘Romance de la Luna Luna’ and ‘Romance somnambulism’ seem to him to be the “roundest” illustrated poems. “In the case of the first I consider that The symbolic dimension of the images integrates very well with Lorca’s words and they provide the whole with great suggestibility; and in the second, which is the romance of the famous couplet ‘green, I love you green’, I used that chromatic statement as a guide in choosing the photos and I think the result is very good,” he concluded.