An example of the nostalgic photography of José Ortiz-Echagüe, generously gifted to the Collection by Jim and Brenda Amos, this image combines the documentary gaze of the camera with the expressionistic qualities of drawing, writes Sophie Rose. This intriguing work invites us to consider the artist’s lifelong project of recording regional Spanish costumes and customs before modernisation, the artist feared, would render them extinct.

Looking at this photograph, we are met with the tired, drawn face of an elderly man. The wrinkles of his skin crumple into the folds of his coat and top hat. He is almost Dickensian in character; his wincing gaze sitting somewhere between a candid expression and a performance for the camera.

The Spanish photographer José Ortiz-Echagüe took three portraits of this man, all titled Lino de duelo (Lino in mourning). They capture Lino Solabarrieta Iruretagoyena (1870–1948), a fisherman who lived in the small village of Orio on the northern coast of Spain, dressed in traditional funeral attire.¹ While not apparent in this close-up, the matching full-length portrait shows Lino’s draping Spanish cape in full, complete with an esclavina or shoulder capelet. In the far view, he stands in front of a rocky section of the Pyrenees Mountains, the range that separates the Basque provinces from the rest of Spain.

This photograph first appeared in the 1957 edition of the artist’s book Espana: Tipos y Trajes (‘Spain: Types and Costumes’) (1929–71). The first of his four photographic volumes, Tipos y Trajes was an elegiac project that consumed Ortiz-Echagüe throughout his life, recording Spain’s regional costumes and customs that the artist believed were on the brink of extinction as the country modernised. (Ortiz-Echagüe was himself an industrialist and perhaps led by a guilty conscience, or at least an awareness of how businesses like his changed labour and life in Spain.)

To match the apparent anachronism of his subject, the artist used an idiosyncratic printing method that he dubbed ‘carbondir’ — in effect, a minor adaptation of Théodore-Henri Fresson’s carbon printing technique. Here, the photographic paper is treated with a dilute carbon solution, lending a textured, matte surface to the final image, which appears less like a photograph and more like a graphite drawing. Though the subjects in Tipos y Trajes were seemingly hardly untouched by modernism, in fact, many of them donned their traditional costumes for the camera. Their knowing participation in the theatre of their ‘extinction’ shows up throughout the book, clouding any simple claims it makes to ethnographic truth.

In the decades that followed, Ortiz-Echagüe’s works were adopted by various, and often contradictory, causes. During the Francoist dictatorship (1939–75), some interpreted his scenes as covert declarations of Basque and Catalonian independence; however, they were equally employed by the regime to promote a vision of Spanish ‘unity in diversity’.² These nostalgic images became malleable signifiers that could propel unionist or separatist movements, the political left or right, or simply promote a picturesque image of the country to tourists. The artist certainly never expressed a political intention behind his work.

Yet Lino in mourning is somewhat different from the other portraits in Ortiz-Echagüe’s oeuvre. Unlike many of his views of the Basque Country, or even his two other images of Lino, this photograph leaves few clues to the sitter’s ethnicity. We are drawn instead to the man’s individual character, to what he really thought as he stared back at the photographer and now, back at us.

Sophie Rose is former Assistant Curator, International Art, QAGOMA.

Endnotes

1. Christian A Peterson, ‘José Ortiz-Echagüe and his “Lino de Duelo”’, History of Photography, vol.13, no.3, 1989, p.238.
2. Javier Ortiz-Echagüe and Julio Montero Díaz, ‘Documentary uses of artistic photography: Spain: Types and Costumes by José Ortiz-Echagüe’, History of Photography, vol.35, no.4, 2011, pp.410–12.