BRINGING HERITAGE CLOSER. PHOTOGRAPHY IN NAVARRA. FUNDS AND COLLECTIONS

29 August 2012

Pioneers of tourist photography in Navarra.
Mr. Jorge Latorre Izquierdo. University of Navarra

Diego Quiroga Losada, Marquis of Santa María del Villar, and José María Álvarez de Toledo are two photographers linked to Navarre who share a common fondness for a genre of tourist photography that is halfway between the artistic (in the context of Pictorialism) and the purely documentary, in the tradition of nineteenth-century travel photography. They are photographers of regenerationist tradition, noventayochist, who broke with both photographic academicism and with the more picturesque and bucolic line of fin-de-siècle realism, and its noucentist extensions, especially in Catalonia. Although this tourist aesthetic had much influence later, and was greatly exploited during Francoism, justice must be done to the photographers who were its pioneers even before the Spanish Civil War.

Diego Quiroga y Losada (1880-1975), Marquis of Santa María del Villar, is associated with Navarre as one of the itinerant photographers who devoted most importance to the region throughout his photographic degree program . On the other hand, it is in Navarre where the Institución Príncipe de Viana treasures an important part of his photographic file staff ; and also where frequent exhibitions of his photographs have been held from July 1965 to the present day. José María Álvarez de Toledo, Count of La Ventosa (1881-1950), is another important photographer from Madrid with links to Navarre, as his wife was from the Mencos family, and he spent many summers at the Guendulain Palace in Pamplona. His family file has been donated to the University of Navarra, to enrich the photographic collection of the future Museum of Contemporary Art. Count de la Ventosa was one of the best known Spanish photographers between 1920 and 1936; he was president of the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid and his work was published in the best magazines of the time, such as Foto, El Progreso Fotográfico or Photograms of the Year. In 1920 he published at his own expense an edition of 300 copies of photographs using rotogravure and heliogravure techniques, graduate Por España. Impresiones fotográficas which was intended to be, in his own words in the prologue, "an example of how the graphic arts and photography complement each other". This handcrafted book is a pioneer among travel books with photographs, and devotes several pages to Navarre, with comments and photographs of types and landscapes. They are in final two photographers who can be studied together, not only because they are friends and make photographic excursions together, but also because they share a common aesthetic within artistic photography, which we can call "tourist".

View of Estella. Count of La Ventosa
Published in "Por España". 1920

Almadía on the Esca. Santa María del Villar. 1916