UNTIL SUNDAY 20/10
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
Two photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron y Francesca Woodman. For the first time, the work of these two pioneers of the medium who fled from technical perfection is shown together., and precisely because they are deliberately imperfect, They captured suggestive and transformative images. One hundred years separate one from the other, but they share a short and intense career where the idea of the staged photographic portrait that does not seek to record reality prevailed., but its construction. Julia Margaret Cameron She was British and self-taught., He dedicated himself during the last fifteen years of his life (1864-1879) to that emerging medium called photography and from it you will be able to see its first success, a portrait of the girl Wilhelmina Philpot from 1986. Their cherubic beings and winged cupids, obvious and without folds, They contrast with the angelic and otherworldly figures of the series Angel of Francesca Woodman, American with a family and artistic training who began taking photographs when he was only fifteen years old.. You can also see Woodman's series of caryatids in which she experimented with large-scale diazotype engravings representing herself and other models..
The two gave capital value to the creative process, They imagined and created through the art of portraiture, using very different techniques.. Cameron would use a wooden camera and glass negatives almost the size of the photos, was direct, I was playing with the idea of the spotlight, He was attracted to religious themes and was very close to his models., for which she was highly criticized when that was precisely what made her work interesting.. one hundred years later, Woodman, more punk, I would photograph in black and white models with defiant looks in decadent settings of peeling walls. In both cases, women rarely appeared pigeonholed or static, expressed attitudes, moods and narratives. one of them, in the case of Cameron, It would be his niece Julia Jackson, Virginia Woolf's mother! The exhibition Portraits to dream of the VATI, organized in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery from London, confront the work of two photographers who, halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, They crafted and captured dreamlike atmospheres in pieces that are rooted in mythology and storytelling.. Mythology, angels and beings from another world, double, nature and femininity, caryatids, the classic way, the men, models and muses mark the themes of an exhibition that confirms IVAM as a bastion of photography, both for his own collection and for his exhibition work. Pay attention, because they are preparing a great retrospective of the Masanas photographer Gabriel Cualladó… S.M.