Any exploration of an art collection —in this case an institutional one— through the medium of its photographic works is a reflection of the journey taken by the image itself, in that it inescapably links three different spheres:

The observer and his or her perception as a sensory experience; the formal proposal, with its intellectual and creative echoes; and the materials as a symptom, signifying both loss and celebration, appearance and disappearance.

These concepts are reflected in art practices that border on the vestigial, the mise-en-scène, the absence/presence of the body, the mannerist and the low-code.

Given the eclectic, contemporary nature of the photography section in the Banco de España Collection, it necessarily embraces a multitude of different approaches. This ‘special distinction’ afforded to a small number of works takes in certain photos that have a sense of the "uncanny"— a disruption of the familiar and a tactility. There is also some sense of transitivity between them, which means that we can go from one to the next with that sense of unease that is engendered when some visual event bursts upon us. It has something to do with those other works in which the poetics of their construction enables us to decipher the notation of the device and the authorial experience, in such a way that things, á la Bataille, just happen. And it has something to do with the intimacy of the institution, the Banco de España, and its image, concluding an itinerary in which art, expression and communication are constitutive categories of a change in attitudes towards artistic creation, back in the early 1970s, when photography began to be used as a sensitive surface while the output of its procedures and its function were enlisted as a record to trap actions/thoughts.

The works in this itinerary include photo-essays, pop art, conceptual art, intervention, seriality and land art. The monument appears constantly as an index, the format or concision of a text in the intentio auctoris, the intuition in each photo of what we cannot see.

Margarita Ledo Andión - Professor of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, University of Santiago de Compostela