3 - Ramón and Photography: ‘The Dead Thing’

Summary

Somos lo inerte que logró enterarse del vivir. (Gómez de la Serna)

The crux of photography in the first third of the twentieth century is inertness, the paralysis that seems to overcome the object due to fragmentary framing, the use of black and white, and, above all, the clinical precision of the lens, what Cánovas del Castillo referred to as ‘the excess of consciousness of the lens’. Alfonso Reyes called it ‘estética estática,’ ‘static aesthetic’. Whether photography has an artistic value or not is secondary. ‘Artistry’ implies ‘vitality’. Latin in-ers or inert means, precisely, ‘non-ars’, ‘without skills’, ‘un-artistic’. The key issue is staffage,

the art of animating vistas, whether they be landscapes, streets or interiors, with the presence of people or living things, although there are some who extend the definition of this concept to include stones, rocks, fallen or standing trees, stranded or moving boats, etc.

The photo of a ‘naked trunk, missing its feet, arms and head’ easily provokes the ‘unpleasant effect of being in an operating theater’. The ‘theater of the skin’ becomes the ‘hospital of the skin’. The mandate was ‘to communicate life, and often attractiveness, to a motif that by itself is lacking in them and that without staffage would look extremely poor and dull’ – whole pictures brimming with life.

Below I will briefly consider three instances of photographic ‘dullness’: pictures of objects in themselves inanimate or still life photography, portrait photography, and the landscape as seen from the sky – aerial photography. For the most part, I will be relying on little-known primary sources from the 1920s and 1930s, including El Sol, Luz, La Publicitat, Agfa, Foto, El Progreso Fotográfico, and other Spanish newspapers and photographic magazines of the times. While Gómez de la Serna did not address all three areas, his ideas about portraiture and aerial photography stand out for their boldness and originality.

The inertness of things: still life photography

‘Still life is the Cinderella of artistic photography’. The reason seems clear – nothing resists more staffage than the photograph of a barbed wire roll. It is not easy to ‘animate’ it.