7 May 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

PHOTOGRAPHERS FROM NAVARRE

The Navarre seen by Nicolás Ardanaz

D. Francisco Javier Zubiaur Carreño
Museum of Navarre

The Navarre that Nicolás Ardanaz witnessed with his camera corresponds to the period from the 1930s to the 1970s inclusive. The photographer from Pamplona (1910-1982), who initially wanted to be a painter and therefore received a training as such in the studio of Javier Ciga Echandi, was aware of being a creative documentarist. On the one hand, his concern for reflecting aspects of his homeland close to the changing times is clear, and in this attitude he coincides with other photographers such as Aquilino García Deán, in relation to the city of Pamplona, and with Diego Quiroga y Losada, Marquis of Santa María del Villar, who, although he was from San Sebastian, devoted a good issue of photographs from his career as a "tourist photographer", to use the expression of his biographer Jorge Latorre, to representing the imperturbable Navarre. But this was also the attitude of other contemporary painters of Navarre, such as Miguel Pérez Torres, Jesús Basiano, José María Ascunce, Jesús Lasterra and Pedro Lozano de Sotés, not to mention the patriarchal scenes depicted by Inocencio García Asarta and Javier Ciga in their canvases from the first quarter of the 20th century. But, on the other hand, his interest in the photographic document manifested itself artistically, as a faithful disciple of Ciga, from whom he took his fundamental themes and pictorial know-how.
 

"View of Pamplona", 1950s. Museum of Navarre.
 

The catalogue of his photographic work reveals several thematic blocks with sub-sections: Civil War; events; portraits (children, old people, representative types, self-portraits); landscapes (mountains, trees, rivers, roads, fields, snowy winters, skies, houses and villages); Pamplona (views of the city, urban landscape, the river Arga, the Cathedral, religious rites, folklore, traffic, industry and incipient growth, its festivals); work (agriculture and livestock, trade, domestic work , trades, transport, domestic animals); popular religiosity (processions and pilgrimages); as well as compositions.

In what constitutes a great reportage of a deeply transformed Navarre today, whose photographic testimonies are preserved in the Museum of Navarre.
 

"El cartel de Fiestas de San Fermín", 1953. Museum of Navarre