In search of my grandfather: Leopoldo Savignac and Basque Photography in the first half of the 20th century

I am in the archive with the copy of the journal which contains the portrait of Franco which Savignac ( my grandfather ) took in 1939 for the National Propaganda Service. In the image ‘El Caudillo’ looks tired, it is the end of the civil war and he is triumphant. Gone are Savignac’s creative, pictorial, carefully composited images of the 1920s. He is now an established studio portraitist in Madrid but as an immigrant he has to prove his worth. He moves from the red zone to the nationalist zone on the strength of a report from his landlady who states that he has ‘observed good socio-political behaviour’. I consider the tensions of that time in order to understand the need he may have felt to protect his family and at what cost. The paper will reflect on practice as research and how to theorise pilgrimage, utilising life writing and photographic work in response to discoveries as well as what remains unknowable. This includes how photographs are taken, made, preserved, archived and written about in different ways (phenomenological, haptic, embodied). Bringing my writing and image making together will include imagined conversations between journeys, images, archive and text.