This exhibition will for the first time be presenting the complete series of pictures taken by the photographer José Ortiz Echagüe in North Africa between 1909 and 1916.
Ortiz Echagüe (Guadalajara, 1868 – Madrid, 1980) is one of the most outstanding figures in 20th-century photography in Barcelona and a key artist with a unique style of work. His thirst for investigating made him a very personal graphic anthropologist, as he decontextualised reality and turned it into artistic creation, offering a highly personal vision, that of his own social and cultural context.
Born into a military family, after graduating he was sent to the ter- ritories of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco as an engineer in the air service. This post brought about a change in his artistic production, a work of a pictorial nature in which we find portraits, allegories and pictures of everyday rural life. During this period he also used aerial photographs, as his work in the Protectorate consisted in taking pic- tures for making cartographic maps and locating enemy positions. Simultaneously, during his free time, he went on taking photographs of the local population in a picturesque reportage on the way of life of the inhabitants of the Rif, which he later developed and sent to photo- graphic competitions.
Ortiz Echagüe’s African work can be seen as the beginning of the project of portraits of ordinary people which was to keep the photogra- pher busy during the subsequent decades. in the sixth edition of the book España. Tipos y trajes, he included the African series, which he hadn’t done in earlier editions. The exhibition takes a fresh look at the origins of Ortiz Echagüe’s work, at the same time as it helps understand his later work.
North Africa. Ortiz Echagüe
March 15 – July 15, 2013
Curator: Javier Ortiz Echagüe
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjuïc, s/n,
08038 Barcelona
Spain
