The journey from the sordid, underground and defiant to the most optimistic and hooligan that builds the vast collection of fashion photography by José Manuel Ferrater (Barcelona, 1948) has a new owner. It is the artist himself, an indisputable reference on an international scale who stood out from the seventies with his transgressive, dark, ironic and sensual aesthetic, who he calls to tell it. "I'm Ferrater, José Manuel Ferrater", reminds me of the torn voice of my interlocutor, who, without further ado, expeditiously, as he has done everything throughout his life, explains:
“I have turned 74 and I have no children. I'm in very good shape, I'm just a little deaf, and now almost retired, I've looked for the best home for my enormous archive. They are more than 50 years of career... The Ministry of Culture has bought it for the collection of the Costume Museum... and they have paid me a lot of money”.
Another file going to Madrid! I interrupt. And he cuts me off quickly (he doesn't seem to be deaf) so that everything is clear from the start.
"I thought it would be a move to leave more than 200,000 photographs and footage (from between 1971 and 2022) sleeping around."
But to Madrid? I insist to José Manuel Ferrater, a true gentleman from Barcelona who has internationalized his imposing portraits (he signs the most rabidly vivid images of Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Valentino and the Ferragamo sisters… and of Nadal or Gasol) in headlines and advertising spots around the world.
“Well yes, Madrid is his place, he was very clear about it. And it's not for politics. It has nothing to do with it. The fact is that I have been a fashion victim all my life. I entered the world of fashion out of pure passion and from there I jumped into photography... fashion. It's the only thing that interests me. I love fashion with devotion and as a fashion victim that I continue to be my cathedral is the Costume Museum. It is a fascinating place, a rationalist building with its amazing gardens, and with all the legacy of Rabanne, Balenciaga, McQueen… Wow! I wanted to be there with them, that's why I only thought of that place. The good thing is that Helena López de Hierro, the director, and her team killed themselves to have me and to make me visible. With a passion and joy that overwhelmed me. Those who think about the curiosity of the botifler should forget it. In this case it doesn't exist."
Too bad, I tell him, Barcelona is losing its own Lindbergh, and now he's the one who interrupts me.
"No no. Lindbergh, no, not at all. It was huge. Magnificent. But I do not like. It's soft. His has a lot of merit, he dazzled guys from the left and the right, rich and poor..., a bit like Julio Iglesias with music, which is also brilliant, but that doesn't suit me. I am (in my photography, painting and poetry) a radical expressionist. I portray real women. feeling. Smoking. Tearing up with laughter... They are sometimes hard photos”.
Perhaps now they would not be well seen, I dare say. And, again, she catches the loop on the fly:
“It's not that they wouldn't be well regarded. It is that they would not publish them. There's an unhealthy vibe to it...it's not like the madness of the seventies. There are trials for everything. Everything is frowned upon. It's all very weird. And, furthermore, there is this contempt for old age that makes me sweat, although it surprises me a lot, just as the indifference that they have always shown towards my work in Barcelona amazes me”.
I can see he's more hurt than angry. Go on:
“Though maybe it's okay like that. I'm just a fashion photographer, but I prefer to surround myself with those who respect my work. I would not like it to happen to me like Miserachs with that exhibition at La Pedrera. They took unpublished photos... and they didn't print them as the master would have done, on hard paper! They did not respect their game of pure contrast. No gray. The force in black and white”.
It is in him, in Miserachs and not in Lindberg, that he recognizes his referent. In fact, he was his teacher during his time at Eina (he entered the first promotion after collecting an insurmountable collection of zeros in a course in Agricultural Engineering) where he was also tutored by Rafols Casamada, Guinovart, Humberto Eco and even Gabo... There he understood that he was an artist. That radical expressionist, as he defines himself, who finally has his work safe.
Background at home? His career military grandfather, polyglot and crazy about culture Manuel de Lambarri, who was the cartoonist for Vogue Paris in the twenties. He would be surprised to know that the fashion victim grandson who did not fit into the family sold his file on December 28 (the same day that the acquisition of Berlanga's legacy was closed) for 200,000 euros. Pretty dough.
