Visual Fictions and the Archive of the Spanish Civil War

In memory of Don Rothman

In 2007, I received from a colleague a small black book by Martí Llorens with a dozen or so photographs of the Spanish Civil War entitled Memorias revolucionarias (1999). ¹ I was, at the time, preparing a presentation on the topic of memory and the Spanish Civil War and was intrigued by how family stories and photographs moved from private to public spaces through the advocacy of surviving relatives, even becoming, in the case of personal belongings, desirable objects in the marketplace. This little black book seemed to offer the perfect example of such transformation: a few snapshots that clearly belonged to different family albums, united in a small collectable object. In these images, men and women are seen in photographs taken during the war, which later were sent home with personal notes. Together, this collection and the messages they contained represented a moving and easily recognizable tribute to those who participated in and (were) lost in the war.

These snapshots made me reflect on what John Updike had written about this type of photographs, as he considered the appeal of these once private “homely staples.” Having surfaced in the marketplace as collectables, the writer saw in this transition a persevering attraction, one that offered “windows, however smeary, into other lives,” keeping the personal even when it became impersonal (“Visual Trophies”). Moving from the safe confines of immediate and personal recognition into a new space from which images can be freely observed and scrutinized without an attached narrative (or attached to different narratives), to me, the possibilities of this free circulation seemed infinite. I thought about how the appearance of such items would affect a historical archive, especially if we understood the archive as Foucault did, as a discursive practice that can be constructed as well as transformed. Or, as was the case with the archive of the Spanish Civil war, still debated among historians and questioned by activists and family members in search of relatives lost in the war, what role would (or should) these personal items play? The small book in my hands seemed to be engaging with those questions while inviting the viewer and the reader of the photographs’ captions to be moved by the memories of the tragic event.

Photographer Martí Llorens published Memorias revolucionarias in 1999. ² Each image in the book is accompanied by a filing card with its title, along with a brief description of the origin of the snapshots and the writing contained in them. Memorias is around 4x6 inches, black, and reminiscent of a passport or a small travel notebook. ³ The few photographs appear to condense the larger history of the war through images once destined for private family albums and presented as perfect vehicles to contemplate the past. Gazing at these images, I was captured by the way they played into my understanding of sepia-colored snapshots of days gone by: a mix of emotion, a sense of loss and nostalgia, curiosity for the private lives of those captured by the camera lens, a longing to know their stories and memories, the sorrow of a past tragedy. Looking even more closely, I marveled at the texture and authenticity of the photographs until I suddenly realized I was in the presence of a red herring. What made me assume their authenticity? How did I “know” these images were real? And soon, a more pressing question, how to read these snapshots once I discovered them to be fictional, a collection of manipulated images prepared by a young Catalan photographer who happened one day to go by the shooting of the film Libertarias (Dir. Vicente Aranda, 1996)?

I begin my analysis of Martí Llorens’s photographs with this personal anecdote to reflect on photographs of war in the context of the Spanish Civil War. These images provide an opportunity to reexamine our understanding of photographic images, their relationship to memory, and our connection to and understanding of the past.

Photography and the Spanish Civil War

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