Robert Latona
posted 18 June 2007

Thomas Struth: Making Time
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Maybe to everything there really is a season, but what purpose under heaven is served by exhibiting photography in the Prado Museum? And what sort of image could resist being overwhelmed by its multitudinous array of masterpieces?

Try images of people interacting with individual works of art in the world’s great museums, cathedrals and similar venues, such as Thomas Struth of Germany has been photographing for the past two decades. Other than the cachet of having cracked the collection that terminates with Goya and said no thanks to Picasso’s Guernica, it seems reasonable to ask just what was achieved during the six weeks that eleven of Struth’s photographs were allowed to jostle Rubens, Breughel, Titian and company right off the walls of the Prado.

I think you have to start by taking his images just as representations of people deployed in the immediate vicinity of some familiar masterpiece, disregarding their photographic qualities. You’ll note the deliberate continuity between the people in the painting (it is always a painting of people) and those who are experiencing it. Usually, it is articulated through a rough parity in scale (the life-sized figures in Seurat’s Grande Jatte) number (a single person contemplating Dürer’s Munich self portrait), age (schoolgirls swarming in front of Velázquez’s dainty maids-of-honor) or colour (the red robes in Veronese’s Last Supper and the sweatshirts on the students beholding it in the Galerria dell’Accademia in Venice.)

Only once, however, does Struth (who I assume determined the placement) go all the way with a photo of people in a corner of the Prado flanked by two Velázquez princelings, and hang the photo in the exact same location. Many others, however, are displayed on a free-standing mount that is the first thing you see as you enter the room, so it looks like a preview of what lies ahead. Only it’s a different work in a different museum.

You start to see where this is heading, with the viewer assuming the role of somebody in a museum looking at a picture of somebody else in some other museum looking at a picture of somebody else (painted by an invisible somebody else, who is the main focus of interest) from decades or centuries before. Boxes within boxes, observers observing the observer who in turn is being observed by his subjects – wait, where have we seen that before? Well, as a matter of fact, right here in the Prado: Velázquez’s Las Meninas. This is my take on Struth and I’m sure it’s far from being the only one possible. Yet if Picasso did dozens of compulsive homages to Las Meninas, why not Struth? His authority to undertake so daunting a challenge -- by one-measure (his c-prints being snapped up at $150,000 a pop over at the ARCO art fair) or another (27th place on somebody’s list of the “100 Most Influential Contemporary Artists” ) -- is as good as anyone else’s.

Koldo Badillo: Colors of Navarra
Casa de Cultura, Tafalla, Navarra

Photos of celebrities are to Annie Liebovitz as photos of striking landscapes are to…aha, fooled you. Of course, the names that would fill in the blank are too numerous to serve as mere sentence filler. My intent is merely to nominate a less familiar name, that of Spanish Basque photographer Koldo Badillo, for inclusion in that select though underappreciated company.

Underappreciated, because landscapes are second only to babies on everybody’s most-photographed list – and both are almost always photographed badly. People tend to think that just by being breathtaking, the Half Dome at Yosemite did all of Ansel Adams’ work for him, when it’s really not like that at all. In Spain, moreover, photos of the land have become anchored to the country’s principal income stream, tourism, a sector with an insatiable appetite for images (on postcards) consumed in a way that guarantees they’ll never be properly looked at by anyone.

Navarra is a northern region spared much of the wanton destruction that has devastated modern Spain because God had the good sense not to give it a coastline. To make up, He gave it everything else: soaring mountains (the Pyrenees), a basin of prodigious alluvial fertility around the Ebro river, open plains geometrically sectioned for crops and grazing, as in the adjacent flatlands of Castile.

All of these landscapes and the features that embellish them, bodies of water, clumps of trees, rock formations and surface textures created by cultivation and vegetation are not just captured but transfigured by this photographer, who wields an array of fancy lenses, filters and darkroom techniques like a painter with a palette knife. The one constant he keeps coming back to is what somebody once called the 'starched blue sky of Spain' and the line of crackling energy known as the horizon that is created when sky and land splay out against each other.

Mainly it is by saturating the image with vivid but carefully-balanced colors that he takes his photographs beyond documentary and beyond calendar fodder, though not at the price of sacrificing their topographical specificity. People who know their way around Navarra have no trouble recognising Badillo’s sites, reacting with a 'Oh, sure, I’ve been there, too,' only to add immediately, 'Here it looks different, though'.

Exactly. The same, only different. 'No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world.' The words are from John Constable, who knew a thing or two about making landscapes come alive. No, I’m not suggesting an absurd comparison, but it’s not overstating the case to suggest that Koldo Badillo is in on the secret, too.

Pierre Gonnord: Paris-Seville
Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid

The only real difference between them is about a dozen or so city blocks in uptown Madrid, plus four centuries of elapsed time and technological innovation. Drop into the Prado to check out the 'Blind Hurdy-Gurdy Player' (if not within dropping distance, Georges de la Tour should be on your - and everybody’s - coffee table). Then come back to the Juana de Aizpuru gallery to make the acquaintance of 'Abel' with his one empty eye socket, the other buried under a thick carapace of oozing cataract, and an upraised hand whose gnarled fingers are deformed by calluses, cuts and filth. Same deal, right?

Same chiaroscuro virtuosity, same mannerisms for depicting the ‘wretched of the earth’ with not a whisker of condescending pity. They’re virtually the same piece of human wreckage, De la Tour’s eyeless street busker of seventeenth-century Lorraine, and Pierre Gonnord’s specimen of a hopeless down-and-outer, a twenty-first century hard luck story in spades. And their impact is likewise comparable.

But Gonnord is a French photographer based in Madrid who travels between Spain and France to search out his subjects in the dirty corners and mean streets where social workers fear to tread, from the Paris banlieue to the squalid shantytowns of Seville, which must be where he found that woman Concepción, whose incredibly resonant face conveys so many possible biographies. Who are his subjects? Illegal immigrants, for the most part, generally from Eastern Europe or North Africa, and not a few of them criminals on the run from the law. Gonnord tells of one: ‘Michel was born in a circus and grew up surrounded by clowns and wild animals. His parents died early on, and he joined the Foreign Legion. Now he lives by himself, and I sometimes see him sweeping up in some brasserie. He reminds me of one of those characters you see in the bygone Paris of Brassaï.’

Gonnord’s references to LaTour (1593-1652) are not just in the backlighting. I submit that the people photographed by Gonnord are living in the same conditions of joyless, precarious misery as did, well, practically everybody at the time Murillo put faces on the carpenters in his nativity scenes, Velazquez painted court-jester dwarfs, and Goya depicted bearded ruffians in the Caprichos. You need only take a look at just about anyone’s version of a penitent St Jerome or a pustulent Job – the latter examples bringing us back once again to De La Tour by way of Auden’s famous: ‘About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters…’