Europe is the overall theme at this year’s Photo España festival. It’s a broad and deliberately open subject, but despite the topicality, another concern stands out even more: bringing to people’s attention female photographers who have been overlooked or all but forgotten.
Juana Biarnés
There is so much style and intimacy in the work of Spanish photographer Juana Biarnés, it is a marvel she managed to balance the two so well. Take her playful portrait of Carmen Sevilla. One of the most famous Spanish actors of the 1960s, Sevilla knew how to perform for the camera, but Biarnés captures a moment as if between close friends. The actor adjusts her corset, completely comfortable in front of the camera.
Biarnés’ interest in the camera came from her father, a sports photographer. She would accompany him to football matches, acting as his assistant when she should have been at school. She recalls the air of machismo and sexist taunts from spectators and other photographers, but it didn’t put her off. Biarnés went on to study photojournalism in Barcelona, where she was the first woman to complete her course. In 1962, she joined the staff at the newspaper El Pueblo, becoming Spain’s first female photojournalist.
The 1960s saw a tourist boom in Spain, which brought with it visits from international celebrities. They became Biarnés’ main subject, and she used her charisma and guile to get scoops that included talking her way on to the Beatles’ plane and into their hotel room. Her photographs are a window into a period of Spanish history when the country was still in the bubble of Franco’s dictatorship, but the outside world was bursting in. Her photographs of matadors show them whispering conspiratorially behind their fans and being visited by celebrities including Ernest Hemingway.
Tired of the accelerating tabloid culture, Biarnes quit photography in 1985 and moved to Ibiza, where she opened a restaurant. Her incredible archive only came to light a few years ago, when she had retired and returned to Barcelona. This is her first big exhibition, curated with humour and a light touch that matches her photography. One pairing has the first wife of Julio Iglesias positioned on the left looking to the right with a shocked expression. The adjacent picture is the lothario himself serenading a young woman.
• Juana Biarnés: Against the Current is at the Fernán Gomez Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid, until 31 July.
Lucia Moholy
Born Lucia Schulz in Prague in 1894, Moholy is largely unknown, despite her pivotal role as photographer at the Bauhaus school in Germany. Her name, however, is familiar, because she was married to the artist László Moholy-Nagy and was hugely influential in his career. They even developed the photogram technique together – for which he got the credit.
Moholy was already an experienced photographer when she accompanied her husband to the Bauhaus in 1923, but it was there she really hit her stride. She photographed the teachers, her fellow students and the pieces they produced, as well as interiors and exteriors of the school’s campus. At the time, photography wasn’t taught at the Bauhaus – it was yet to be considered a subject in its own right – so Moholy took photographs as a kind of extra-curricular activity.
Her work caught the attention of the school’s director, Walter Gropius, who recognised that her aesthetic and intellectual approach married with the Bauhaus philosophy, and put her to work photographing the school’s press and publications – again, work for which she was rarely credited.
Knowing that Moholy’s photographs were taken during such an intense period of artistic activity – a time when, outside the school, German society was falling at the seams – makes them all the more fascinating. There is something very open and disarming in the faces of these serious practitioners.
Her portrait of Gropius captures him leaning into the camera with a penetrative gaze. Her still lifes are no less engaging, alive with texture and graphic lines from her strong use of light and shade, never compromising the integrity of the object. The pattern of light shining on a Bauhaus coffee pot and ashtray makes them sculptural, even tactile.
The Moholys left the Bauhaus in 1928 and parted ways soon after. In 1929, Lucia fled Berlin to London leaving everything she owned, including all her negatives. (Most of them were retrieved in the 1950s, when she was living in Zurich.) In London, Moholy continued work as a photographer, opened a portrait studio and wrote art criticism. in 1937, Penguin commissioned her to write a history of the medium, 100 Years of Photography, which sold 40,000 copies in two years. In the book, Moholy, who died in 1989, predicts the transmission of colour photographs over phone lines, saying “it certainly will be done some day”.
• Lucia Moholy: A Hundred Years Later is at Loewe, Madrid, until 30 August.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Moholy’s almost exact contemporary Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989) is celebrated with an extensive exhibition at Photo España and a new publication by Aperture. The US photographer is best known for her fashion editorials: she worked at Harper’s Bazaar for 22 years, shooting 85 covers for the magazine at the peak of its creativity, under legendary editors including Diana Vreeland.
It was Dahl-Wolfe’s photograph of a then-unknown model on the cover of the March 1943 Harper’s that propelled Lauren Bacall to Hollywood fame.
Dahl-Wolfe took fashion photography out of the studio and on to the street. Her shoots made fashion desirable not just for the clothes, but for a high-class lifestyle played out in exotic locations. Her photographs are exquisite in detail and tone, and precisely composed, a result of only using large- or medium-format cameras, even when 35mm was more convenient.
Before getting into photography, Dahl-Wolfe studied art in San Francisco, where she painted and practised drawing from nude. You can see her attention to the physical form in how she posed her subjects. Twins at the Beach, 1955, is a great example: witty in its symmetry, and cool and sexy.
It’s also clear she was heavily influenced by other artists. In one image, models are photographed at MoMA in New York looking at a painting by Matisse; in another, she has the model stepping through a hole in the paper backdrop – a nod to Matisse’s paper cutouts. In a 1953 photograph of the model and actor Suzy Parker, who stands like a classical sculpture dressed in Balenciaga on the banks of the river Seine, a woman sits drawing in the background. Women aren’t just clothes horses, they’re artists, too.
• Louise Dahl-Wolfe: In Her Own Style is at Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, until 25 August. Karin Andreasson travelled to Photo España courtesy of the festival and the Spanish tourist board.
