Retrato familiar (Family Portrait)

In the 1960s, Fernando Gordillo produced a long photo-study of a place in the province of Ávila called Pedro Bernardo, a village in decline (like all the others at the time in Spain) because of mass emigration to the cities. Like other photographers from the Madrid school, Gordillo prefers to capture images of past times, attempting to conserve ways of life that disappear without anybody really noticing. At that time Pedro Bernardo was not some wretched little village, it had healthy agriculture and a number of craftsmen’s workshops. Gordillo’s photos are not denouncing injustice or poverty, they simply portray the Pedro Bernardo inhabitants sympathetically, creating a gentle testimony to them, completed by their formal aspect of traditional nineteenth century portraiture, which can also be seen in some paintings and drawings by artists like Antonio López.

Horacio Fernández