I've had a fantastic life, I've done what I wanted to do. Finding a reason for your life is something that fulfills you. And being a freelancer, you have the freedom to choose. And that is important in life, choosing and hoping that you choose well, of course.” The one who speaks, funny, is Pilar Aymerich (Barcelona, 1943), National Photography Prize of 2021. Her humor is good and her memory is prodigious. When going through the 154 images that make up the first major retrospective dedicated to her career, Aymerich remembers the most unlikely anecdotes about her.
From the first image he took in beatnik-era Paris of young people sleeping in sacks by the river – “I went to talk to them a lot, we went to eat soup at Saint Étienne” – to a snapshot taken in the Speaker's Corner of the Hyde Park in London – “this man talked about the English not eating French fries because they gave diarrhea” –, passing by the Rambla in Barcelona in 1972, where the Venus Dome was a boarding house “with many marginalized people” and there he took some fascinating images of “a transsexual who was a truck driver from Córdoba who came to Barcelona to have surgery.”
It is Vivid Memory, an exhibition that the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid is showing until January 7 – and that will be seen at the Center d'Art Tecla Sala de l'Hospitalet in September of next year – curated by Neus Miró who reviews his career in images. Some of them, at the beginning, starring her, when she was a theater actress. Then, taken by a camera that in the seventies portrayed the transition of an entire country.
“The exhibition reminds us of that extraordinary moment of a Barcelona at the end of the Franco regime in which at the same time an enormous cultural explosion occurred with the appearance of avant-garde institutions in which Pilar was the protagonist and a moment of political revolution at the service of progressivism. , socialism, feminism, causes in which he was also a protagonist and exceptional witness,” emphasizes Valerio Rocco Lozano, director of the Circle.
And indeed in the exhibition there are everything from feminist, gay and lesbian or Catalan demonstrations to incredible moments such as the transition that the Trinitat women's prison experienced from the moment the nuns who commanded it left and until the arrival of the new officials, the Prisoners manage themselves, although at first some were reluctant to be their own prison guards. “There were prisoners for adultery, abortion, family abandonment... crimes classified at that time,” says Aymerich.
“In Pilar's work the photographs did not illustrate the texts, they gave rise to him many times, he went to a demonstration and informed Vázquez Montalbán or Montserrat Roig that he had photos and they produced the text,” recalls the curator. But she highlights that the exhibition goes further.
“There have been multiple exhibitions of Pilar, but they have always concentrated on one aspect, especially in the transition, in her work in black and white... we wanted to broaden the spectrum and that is why the exhibition begins with her years of training in theater, important because they will later make your photographic work have a special interest in the scenography, in how it frames and creates a context that speaks of the character it is portraying.” And, he continues, they also wanted to show how she will continue working in the eighties. “In 1982 she went with Montserrat Roig to Cuba for an interview with Fidel Castro that ultimately could not be done. But they will do a report on the moment on the island and from that moment on Cuba and Havana will be the place of repeated projects.”
“I am the product of one generation, I don't know if I would have done the same in another,” says Aymerich, who assures that he went “to look for the photo but I waited for it to take place, I arrived hours before, I looked at the light, I assumed where would they happen? "I don't hunt for photos, I fish, pay attention to what can happen." And he still concludes that “I don't know if I am a photographer or a person who takes photographs, I haven't discovered it yet, I hope others will say so.”
