Considered the portrait painter of Barcelona's Gauche Divine, Colita (Isabel Steva, 1940) feels, above all else, a journalist. Her reports on Carmen Amaya and the gypsies of Somorrostro or the first demonstrations after Franco's death are just one of the many examples of this. She is an animal lover, a staunch defender of feminism and Spanish photographic heritage, she has just received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 2021.
Terenci Moix wrote that Colita's art does not distance itself, that it needs love to produce itself. She has always preferred to photograph the people she knows and loves and when I highlight the sensuality that all her subjects ooze –Carmen Amaya, Ana María Moix, Jaime Gil de Biezma, to name a few– she replies that her photos are good because they are taken from the proximity.
"Did you know that in France they say that children are born from under a cabbage?" the photographer asks me with that mischievous look of hers. "That's why my dear dad invented the Colita thing. I was very good until I was twelve, from that age everything became more complicated..."
Colita laughs and confesses to me that she's sick of talking about herself. In recent times, tributes, interviews and exhibitions have been taking place with little respite. I have arrived at the delicious little house of the photographer with the desire to talk and shred some of her most iconic photos. I know that from Wells's wink or Elsa Peretti's rooster, all Colita will come out. But I start off badly and we entertain ourselves with being born under a cabbage. She corroborates her reputation as an impeccable professional by responding, with extreme goodwill, to recurring themes such as the origin of her name or her reputation for being foul-mouthed.
"Foul-mouthed but not ordinary," he clarifies. "I received a poorly religious education, I didn't choose it, but neither did my parents, there was little to choose from at that time, and I studied at the Sacred Heart, which made me a foul-mouthed, a an agnostic, a republican, all the worst. Instead of coming off as a Sacred Heart lady I came off as some kind of jellyfish. Do you understand?"
I am going to spend most of the interview laughing, dazzled by her extraordinary sympathy – she will tell me several times that having fun and playing is the most serious thing in life – and I decide to ask few questions and let myself be carried away by her overwhelming vehemence. .
She says she owns ten minutes of Orson Wells' life.
Well yes. It was on the set of Campanadas at midnight. I was taking photos, without being annoying, which is one of the fundamental conditions of a photographer, that they don't see you, because otherwise you go to the street immediately, and I watched him throughout the morning, how he grabbed the actors, hugged them! , he released them! He was a force of nature. A secretary was serving him cigars and brandy and he was huge, enormous, of course, he played Falstaff in Chimes, he was a very attractive being, despite being a hippopotamus, he was a very attractive hippo. When they called me, he received me very kindly. I have often wondered how arrogant certain actors are today, when I have met some top-class actors who were completely normal and educated, like Mr. Wells, for example. I was a monkey and Mr. Wells received me, he was very polite and posed for me.
Did they talk, did you have to give him instructions...?
Instructions? Nooo, it wasn't faaalta… When you photograph a real professional, it goes without saying anything, you get high and he gets high. He was sitting and I was standing, I got closer with my Rollei, he turned, (Colita looks at me from the side, closes one eye and imitates the gesture of the creator of Citizen Kane that she immortalized) and zasca! (I laugh and she smiles). I knew right away that he already had it. And then, well, nothing, thank you very much Mr. Wells, very grateful, you're welcome, and we shook hands. I continued taking photos and, a little later, I saw him leaning against a wall, with all his bulk, his eyes closed, and I fired. Then he saw me and made me (Colita raises his index finger and pretends not to) And I... well, I put away the junk, do you understand? It didn't occur to me to hide and keep shooting. No. And he didn't send a production dwarf to tell that bitch you're kicking her off the set. No. he just told me, stop. And I stopped. That was the last photo I took of him.., but I stayed to see him, of course I stayed to see him, I wanted to devour with my eyes everything he was doing. And he is already. This was my relationship with Orson Wells..., which seems to me rich! –He laughs– it wasn't about him liking me, nor about telling us about our lives, he was polite and generous and gave me his time, he didn't treat me like a shitty paparazzi that runs around. He was a genius and he had a very large human category.
Oriol Maspons said that it should have been the Annie Leibovitz of this country. What do you think of the American's work?
Well, it's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That it has a part that I really like, like Women, but on the other hand, all those sophisticated and elaborate photos of fashionable actors interest me less, they seem to me to be splendid illustrations from luxury magazines. Oriol was a teacher for me, he always admired me a lot. He was the first human being on earth who listened to me. He saw the exhibition I did on Gauche Divine, Gauche qui rit, which I didn't attach importance to, it was like a toy, to laugh at, but it dazzled him and that's why he told me, take Peretti and go to New York, that you will be the second Leibovitz from there, or the Leibovitz from here, I don't really know what he said and what does it matter... Because can you tell what I do in New York if what I like is eeeeess? The Costa Brava, partying, wine... New York? What boredom!…
The coldness of the pixel or the warmth of the grain?
We dreamed of the perfection of sharpness and now filters are invented to break the pixel and get the grain. The world is very strange. The way of looking has changed. Now immediacy matters, I'm sending you the photo so you can see that I've been to the pyramids even though the pyramids come out a mess. The first serious essay on photography in world history was written by the Sontang, On Photography, and it already develops this theme. I just saw it at the MET, the Metropolitan Museum in New York... it's something, how would I tell you? Scary. There were mountains of people, not mountains, HUNDREDS of Japanese, invading a room, with a Van Gogh, I think, and a very fat lady in uniform shouting like a disheveled "Nooo flashhh!" All the time, you understand, and the entire museum rumbled and the Japanese as if they heard rain, chas, chas, chas You can't believe it, completely SURREAL, you understand, and you say, of course, I'm in a world, I don't know, at the end of the 31st century?, Mad Max!, and this is exploding everywhere. And you know what I tell you? That I'm happy to grow up and miss everything I'm going to miss because everything is going to be very unpleasant, if they tell me tomorrow you'll die, well I say, oh, that's great. I guess if you have children you must have another feeling. When you read that the arctic is melting and that there will be no water... well... I don't know... With so many iPads, the teddy bear is over... He's dead...
Colita looks at me amused while I wipe away the tears from the laughing fit she gave me with Mad Max at the Met. I pull myself together a bit and manage to contradict him on this last point. "No, no, the teddy bear isn't dead," I tell her. “Oh, isn't he dead?” she asks. "For my ten-year-old daughter, not yet," he asserted. "Praised be God."
Colita, in my eyes, is as big as Orson was in his. The mixture of wisdom, joking and generosity with which she gives herself - today, to me, in her feral garden - does not fit into the unforgettable diminutive that is all affection. Isabel is above all Colaza. But, forever and ever, it will be Colita. Colita the Great
