PHOTO:Carlos Pérez Siquier

Carlos Pérez Siquier is considered a pioneer of Spanish Avant-Guard photography. Co-founder of AFAL (Agrupación Fotográfica Almeriense) in the 50’s whose members set the bases for a new documentary photography in Spain. His “La Chanca” series (color and b/w) of a modest barrio in Almeria stands out as a humanistic document. Even more surprising and innovating was “Colores del Sur” in the 70’s, only comparable to later works of William Klein (80’s) or Martin Parr (90’s).

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fundación MAPFRE Archive

An exhibition of Carlos Pérez Siquier is on show at Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona. Born in Almería, where he has lived throughout his life, from the onset of his career in the 1950s’ Carlos Pérez Siquier has always been a peripheral artist. In 1956 Carlos Pérez Siquier when still employed at a bank, every Saturday he approached La Chanca,  neglected and poor neighborhood in Almeria, for a photo-study that never got beyond the project stage. For ten years he was hanging around its streets, merging with its inhabitants, who stopped considering him a stranger and assumed his presence as part of everyday life. He worked there until the mid-1960s, first in black and white, then in color. Although Pérez Siquier claimed that his wish was to “praise these people”, like the humanist photography created by the exhibition “The Family of Man” (1955), the pictures of La Chanca were considered images of critical reportage along the lines of Juan Goytisolo’s book “La Chanca” (1962), in which he states that in La Chanca “they live the enslaved life of the man under the yoke of barbarous colonial exploitation”. The same year he also founded AFAL, a magazine and group that revolutionized the Spanish photography scene. AFAL was the catalyst for the most influential photography collective of its time, an important showcase for the work of the most interesting and innovative young Spanish photographers of the time. It is rightly considered to be the most important renewal movement in the history of Spanish photography. From this remote border space, over the course of six decades Pérez Siquier has created a photographic corpus that in an incidental and yet also profound and mordant way enters into the debates of his time. In his photographic series we discover the social periphery, the visual alterations generated by the economic development of the Franco regime, the culture shock produced by the mass arrival of foreign tourism in Spain, and the penetration of a new coloristic and sensuous visual culture behind the slogan “Spain is Different” that superficially replaced the trauma of the aftermath of the Civil War on the country’s coasts, as well as the photographer’s recent withdrawal into more personal spheres. Along these lines, the transition from the representation of social criticism to the curious and skeptical celebration of consumer society reflects a genuine change of paradigms in postwar European society. This is clearly the thread that connects his work with the proposals of the most critical Pop Art, with auteur film of the sixties and with the literature of his generation. Hence the present exhibition is a broad retrospective that runs through his most noteworthy series produced between the years 1957 and 2018, and also contains a significant number of hitherto unpublished images that will further the international recognition of an artist who in 2003 won the National Prize for Photography awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

Info: Curators: Carlos Gollonet and Carlos Martin, Fundación MAPFRE , Casa Garriga Nogués Exhibition Hall, Carrer de la Diputació, 250, Barcelona, Duration: 14/2-17/5/20, Days & Hours: Mon 14:00-20:00, Tue-Sat 10:00-20:00, www.fundacionmapfre.org