Reframing the archive: Searching for Leo: Creative uses of the archive

Research output: Contribution to conferenceConference paper (not formally published)peer-review

Abstract

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.
To go to the archive and study the documents there is to be complicit in the ways in which the information is organized and what it represents of the past as well as for the present. What is not there is just as interesting… the fragmented status of my grandfather’s photographic practice echoing his own immigrant status.
The paper will reflect on practice as research and how to theorise pilgrimage, utilising auto/biographical 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.

Presented as part of Reframing the archive 26-27 Sept 2024 International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture 5th edition. Archival practices in Contemporary Visual Arts, Searching for Leo: Creative uses of the archive, Online conference organised by Archivo Platform and the Archivo Papers journal.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusSubmitted - 26 Sept 2024

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