Cuatro Direcciones: fotografía contemporánea española, 1970-1990

This review of Spanish photography over the last twenty years assumes a social and political specificity of Spain in general and the photographic environment in particular, which remained isolated from the international community in the Seventies. Despite the lack of national infrastructure for the development of photography, the upgrading and modernisation of photographic practice takes off… mainly thanks to the impetus of private and self-managed initiatives, like the Nueva Lente magazine, founded in 1971. In that way, facing almost non-existent government support, the two axes on which the Spanish photographic reality rests in the Seventies is self-promotion from artists, nationally and internationally, and the appearance of spaces, galleries (Spectrum, which opened in 1973 in Barcelona, was a pioneer in this respect), schools and associations that encouraged the diffusion, both theoretical and practical, of authors and works through courses and seminars. For many of these proposals, the models from which they stem were Rencontres Internacionales de la Photographie de Arles and the Mois de la Photo de Paris.

In the late seventies photography finally became a university subject in the faculties of Fine Arts in Barcelona and Madrid, this and the progressive development and venturing into a network of creation, promotion, dissemination and discussion on international photography influenced a more theoretical and critical training of the authors and a greater awareness of the artistic category of photography by institutions and the markets.