PhotoEspaña 2009 opens its doors this year with an anthological exhibition of a photographer who has been a privileged witness of the everyday life in Spanish villages. The exhibition, at Museu Colecção Berardo, includes about a hundred images of series like Village Lances, Vanitas or Against Nature, as well as photographs of recent production. Said Sérgio Mah . . “We began hosting exhibitions in Portugal last year. There’s a certain interest in collaborating with PHotoEspaña, in this case at the Museu Berardo. It’s a fantastic museum, one of the most important ones in Lisbon. I believe that working in the culture sector today means working within a network, and both countries benefit from this collaboration. I think the historical context of the Iberian Peninsula should be seen as a whole in cultural terms.
For years Cristóbal Hara has witnessed the everyday life of Spanish villages, photographing them as if he belonged to them and merging the document with emotions. His first photographs, in black and white, were made with a clear documentary objective in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive instant, but since he began to work with colour photography, he has evolved in a direction in which his interest is no longer the subject but photographic language.
One hundred photographs are united in this retrospective, and they reveal the author’s relationship with the theme of the everyday during his entire professional career. The show comprises images from series as well known as Lances de aldea (Village Lances) (1992), Vanitas (1998) and Contranatura (Against Nature) (2006), as well as works produced recently, creating a visual summary of the Madrid photographer’s artistic trajectory.
Cristóbal Hara (Madrid, 1946) spent his childhood between the Philippines, Germany, the United States and Spain, and he studied law and business management in Madrid, Hamburg and Munich. His work was shown for the first time in the travelling exhibition Three Photographers, organised by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 1974, and he later exhibited his photographs at the Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid, the Huis Marseille Foundation and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others. His book Vanitas (1999) received the Best Photography Book of the Year Prize in PHotoEspaña 1999.
Cristóbal Hara began in the photo reportage tradition in black and white and has changed since, like many others have done, because the times have also changed. Today this photography is much more metaphorical, much more iconic. Moving towards color and the fact that he uses film that gives you more saturated colors makes his photos achieve a mix between informality and a very strong, formal finish. It’s also a very paradoxical photography because it’s at once descriptive and metaphorical.
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