Santi Léonard has a terrible time entering the small room of the museum where a series of portraits of a beautiful woman who looks at the camera proud, powerful and in love is displayed. "It's just that if I go in and stay for a while, I get crying...", she confesses with her heart in her hand, her eyes moist and her gaze lowered.
The woman's name is Rosario Amaya, a gypsy from Barcelona, her mother. The photographer, his father, was the great and still little-known Jacques Léonard, or Payo Chac, French, the eye that made known, with vigorous mastery and unparalleled purity, the life of the gypsies in the barracks of Somorrostro or in those of Montjuïc in the fifties and sixties.
No one, perhaps Colita comes close to it, moved so freely in a world parallel to that Barcelona of developmentalism, an invisible and invisible city where joy and misery, revelry and substandard housing, coexisted as Paco Candel explained in his day. in his novels. Santi Léonard is excited and, at the same time, exultant. That's right.
With two exhibitions dedicated to his father's work, ranging from advertising photography, to social or traditional and anecdotal photography, the name Léonard shines with its own light at the 54th edition of Les Rencontres Photographiques d'Arles, which has opened its squares , streets, galleries and museums to show the world from those magical positive papers.
Léonard, whose fund is partly managed by the Photographic Social Vision Foundation of Barcelona, exhibits his work in the two places where this unmissable event in world photography was born in the early 1970s: the Réattu museum and the Anne Clergue gallery, daughter of Lucien, the co-initiator of the initiative more than 50 years ago.
The Réattu, a former palace of Knights of the Order of Malta, is proud to present “The Nomadic Spirit”, the photographer's first retrospective (until October 1st), a living testament consisting of 164 images (68 vintage prints, 85 current and 11 portraits). France pays tribute to a photographer who is little known in his country and who became a professional in Barcelona "after his first steps in the cinema as a film editor, some of which won awards in Venice," Santi points out.
Santi remembers that Jacques Léonard photographed everything, but that before those years, he experienced two episodes in first person that showed him that he had a good eye, an innate technique and a monstrous capacity for work: "I went from 15 to 30 years, until my father retired, stuck in the laboratory, I didn't get out of there”, recalls Santi, who has a brother, nicknamed Loli.
The perspectives and points of view included the trends that had originated in the 30s at the hands of avant-garde artists. The second episode, a decade later in 1954, was a first-row portrayal of how the Spanish prisoners who had fought alongside the Nazis in the Blue Division and had been interned in Soviet forced labor camps arrived at the port of Barcelona.
María Planas, who has curated the retrospective of the Réattu, a museum directed by Daniel Rouvier, points out that "between 1949 and 1951, before settling in Barcelona, Léonard embarked on a circus tour of several countries and there he began to photograph" with all the intention. Once in Barcelona, he opened a studio and dedicated himself to advertising photography and "collaborating in media such as La Vanguardia and La Gaceta Ilustrada", recalls his son.
Francesc-Català Roca gave him contacts in these media to publish his journalistic reports. He did not always use his name and sometimes signed pseudonyms. The photographer, who throughout his life will discover that he is half payo and half gypsy (his father was a horse dealer), unfolds: “Photograph the Davis Cup at Tennis Barcelona or the 24 hours of Montjuïc ”.
The legacy of this artist is immense, some 20,000 negatives, but it would be even more so because one part was damaged and another, unfortunately, was lost, laments the photographer's son, who has a hard time remembering that episode because it was an unfortunate coincidence . In the conversation, of course, the scenes of gypsy life come out, authentic as can be, portrayed by Payo Chac.
“I worked a lot. She saw the photo before anyone else. I spent fifteen years with him in the studio. I would go to the slaughterhouse of the current Escorxador and buy cow gall that acted as a dryer for the photos and did not leave stains on the printed copies”, recalls Santi Léonard.
“Many of the photos in which Barcelona appears as a setting, the characters have their backs turned as if looking to the future or the horizon”, points out Sílvia Omedes. He was like that too, she looked ahead. He was married to a Swiss woman but when he met Rosario Amaya, an artists' model and cousin of the bailaora Carmen amaya, everything changed.
He entered the Calo world and integrated into it as one more, not as an observer, but with the idea of publicizing a community that was always stigmatized without filters: “He had the will to spread and preserve the traits and traditions of a culture that it was being transformed”, says curator María Planas. Weddings, life, death, parties, pilgrimages and pilgrimages such as those of El Rocío, Montserrat, Lourdes and especially the Santas Marías del Mar in the Camargue and where he went for 10 years in a row.
Some of the photos of those pilgrimages appear in Anne Clergue's gallery, when the gypsy world was evolving. A grandfather listens to a record player. Motorhomes are no longer horse-drawn wagons, there are utility vehicles and more or less luxurious cars... It is worth making a pilgrimage to Arles every year, perhaps even more so this year.
