Between document and fiction: photo-reports in Spain of the 1960s

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to analyze the resurgence of the costumbrista genre in Spain during the 1960s, when reports of daily scenes and portraits of urban characters started to be accompanied by documentart photographs. In this period, the relationship between the literary text and the photography was widely developed through the publication of a series of booklets, both in Spain and in Latin America. The main corpus of this research is the new book Nuevas escenas matritenses, which brings together photographs by Enrique Palazuelo and texts by Camilo José Cela. In this work, the approximation between word and image either enhaces the storytelling process or generates tension between the two media. In order to carry out this analysis, we resorted to the reflections of Joan Fontcuberta and André Rouillé on the limits and transformative power of photographic realism, as well as to the observations of Christoph Rodiek on the work of Camilo José Cela and Karl Erik Schøllhammer about the relations between word and image.