The photographer who would refuse to take a photo
Pilar Aymerich’s photographs are particularly silent and discreet, even though they are full of curiosities. They tell us about an inner life, something which merits a long conversation with the artist. So, I went to visit her at her modernist flat in the Gràcia neighbourhood in Barcelona. Its high balconies, tiled floors like multi-coloured carpets, the dolls, pictures, old machines, the jazz in the air, art books, her cats, the portraits of friends… all converged on her and expressed something to me that I would like to share with you here: the fact that her photography and her life are inseparable.
The day before we met there had been a general strike. Although Pilar is retired as a photojournalist, she still feels the urge to go out and document special moments in her city. For her, the essence of photography is to be there in the present, above all when there are ground-breaking events that awaken society. She does not conceive of life without photography and this has become a way of life for her. She takes part in a collective blog in which each member contributes the best from their professional experience, so she has the perfect excuse to keep active and pushing herself to achieve a committed and responsible point of view. The professional assignment had always been a challenge for her, the way of testing herself, to reach where she could never have gone on her own. These days she sets the challenges herself, beyond the comfort of her home and surroundings.
Pilar does not understand those friends who only think or talk about photographic technique. She needs the experience of culture, to enjoy literature, the visual arts and thought. Once you forget about the technique – which you have to learn how to apply automatically, just like learning to walk – the whole issue is knowing how to look: to detect those details that reveal the concerns in society and, even more so, that reveal the human soul that underlies every moment in existence and that, amidst the noise of events, some photographers forget to capture. Pilar always expresses that soul through the experience of the person who lends us their portrait in the midst of the action. This is the mission of the committed photographer: to put yourself alongside a cause and express the reality of what is happening to humanity, a quality that she undoubtedly learned from her poet friends. And even if Pilar’s verses are forged with the cold steel of reality as it really is and the black and white, apparently without style, without expressive pretension, without ostentation, they always appear delicate and transcendental to us.
Before she photographs, she researches the theme but does not plan unnecessarily. She listens, observes and thinks. And she reaches clear conclusions. Prudent. When the time comes, she only takes one photo, two at the most, to capture the moment that she had intuited. She thinks events are structured like plays in classical theatre whereby the introduction paves the way for the climax, to finally diffuse in the conclusion. The photographer’s mission is to extract a photo from that final moment like someone who finds a fine piece of porcelain among the straw of a package. You have to anticipate this unrepeatable subtlety, follow your intuition and capture it in flight. Achieving that is not just a talent, Pilar had to train when she was younger in order to achieve it. She tells me things I have never heard other professionals describe. When she began her career as a photographer, she practised the precision timing of pressing the shutter by photographing the bounce of a table tennis ball. Her respect for unrepeatable reality meant that she would not practise in the street while she was still taking photographs just to improve her skill. The events that took place during the Transition to Democracy in Spain, coinciding with the early years of her career, were so important that she could not simply go out just to practise her skills. In the street she had to be infallible. Until she had managed to get the table tennis ball to be in the centre of every single frame in the contact sheet, she would not consider herself qualified: only then would she be ready to anticipate the moment, to capture that unique and fleeting instant that was awaiting her in the street. The discretion that characterizes her hides a sharp perception. As Montserrat Roig described her: “She captures for the future what we cannot conceal”.
There are photos that it is best not to take, Pilar says. Some people think that by pressing the shutter they have done their job, but that is not the case for her. A bad photograph is no use to her, it will still leave the hole for a good photo to fill. Returning home empty-handed when the circumstances have not been conducive shows the honesty of the photographer, which is why she has sometimes refused to take photographs.
She tells me an anecdote from 1978, which catches my attention because it expresses really well her attitude towards issues, as a photographer and as a person. It was during a portrait shoot with Joseph Losey, who was presenting his film Les Routes du Sud. When Pilar entered the hotel room where the journalists were due to meet the filmmaker, a group of photographers were already besieging him with camera flashes. Losey noticed this young photographer who was discreetly observing the scene without taking any photos. He asked her, “Why aren’t you taking any photos of me?”. Pilar replied, “Because the light isn’t good and you’re badly seated”. Noticing that she spoke English well, Losey asked her to tell the other photographers that he was tired and wanted to finish. But he beckoned her to stay behind to chat, and it was then that Pilar took the portrait, close up. It was the photograph she had been waiting for, the one she would never stop taking.
Pilar describes how most of the demonstrators on the march for the general strike were taking selfies and panoramic shots of the crowds on their mobiles. Unlike other photographers, she is not bothered by the proliferation of cameras in the street. On the contrary, this living renaissance of photography in the digital era encourages her. The reason it does not bother her is because it is not in competition with what she is seeking. She shows me photos that she took around Plaça de Catalunya where groups of demonstrators were lighting bonfires to block off the streets. Projectiles were raining down in the space between the barricades and the police. “At that moment, though, there was no one there taking photos”, she says. A vertical frame shows a bonfire three or four metres away from the centre of the road. You can see the demonstrators in the background, semi-visible behind the smoke and the flags colouring the flames in red. “You’re so brave, Pilar!”, I said, “You’ve still got it, just like the good times of the Transition!”. Pilar smiles. Obviously she would not have been running among the demonstrators when she took the photo: she is a methodical woman who has thought and calculated the positions, the steps, the parapets, the timing, just about everything so that those practical details, those trivialities, do not get in the way of the masterful intuition of the photographic moment. She has applied the discipline of discretion. It is a tactic she learned when she was young, at a time when there were no democratic guarantees that might prevent her being hit on the head by a baton: go unnoticed and do not attract attention. She also learned it by watching her professional colleagues when they launched themselves, as if from the trenches, in the hunt for a photograph, dressed in their vests with dozens of pockets loaded with lenses. For Pilar, photographers who behave like that are intrusive, cross the line and become the target of the gaze, thus modifying the situation. The photographer should be dressed in camouflage and know how to ‘stay in the ditch’, like when she dressed in black and crouched down to do her photographic reports at the theatre. And like when she dressed in a suit jacket and high heels to go to demonstrations, thus masking her professional role and taking advantage of stereotypes about women to immunize her from the Francoist police. She listened, watched, thought and finally, when she felt the decisive moment in her heart, she discreetly took the photo with her camera, using it as a wall to help her separate herself from that world that existed regardless of whether she was watching it, but with the intimate desire to have joined in the struggle. And if the police discovered her taking photographs, she would put on the charm, place her hand in her bag to do her make-up, all the while watching with great attention using the mirror, as if she were spying through a rear-view mirror.
These days, in her more advanced years, she continues using the tactical technique. She shows me the next photograph from the previous day’s demonstration. It is a perfectly framed image of a demonstrator, frozen in the bold gesture of leaving the shop filled with grey tear gas. Is the photo cropped or retouched? Nowadays it is impossible to think of a photo that has not been touched up. However, Pilar finds perfection not in the final print but in the first version of the scene. She has learned to stay relaxed while taking the photo, thus she manages to keep the horizon level, control the speed so the bodies do not appear blurred, and find the distance at which a 50 mm lens can capture the whole scene without losing anything that she wants to be kept in, nor including anything in that will have to be cropped out afterwards. From the time of the first demonstrations after the death of Franco to the present, she takes photographs at eye level, from the point of view of people, without yearning for the photogenic panoramic views of the masses from above. For her, the masses are the sum total of individual faces that “get lost in the unlimited sea of the collective”, as Josep Maria Carandell said in 1977, when Pilar first exhibited photos taken in the street during the tumultuous year of 1976. Each person is shown with their life imprinted onto their face and their clenched fist creating a frieze that no other artist could draw, about to dissolve and disappear if it were not for the photographer’s speed and intuition. This perspective, at the height of people themselves, underlies her moral point of view. Spending time on the artifice of the high-angle shots, the angles, the far-fetched frames, would meaning crowding out the neatness of her message with noise. As Jean-Luc Godard said about tracking shots, she thinks the same about photographers who measure the value of their images on the basis of their technical or compositional resources: framing is a matter of morals.
The advance of the masses, captured at eye level, expresses the full power of the revolution. That is how Bernardo Bertolucci saw it when he chose the painting Il quarto Stato, by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, to be the poster for his film Novecento. The hard-edged faces of the proletarians, in a supposedly realistic effect of the painting, was a symbol for all the workers in the world at the beginning of the march. In February 1976, five months prior to the premiere of the film in Italy – the film was not shown in Spain until the end of 1978 – Pilar Aymerich had taken a photo that is now impossible not to relate to that iconic image. It was of a very similar scene taken in Carrer de Ferran in Barcelona. Using the aforementioned technique, Pilar found a discreet place and waited for the front of the march gathering pace up the street. She waited to capture all the feelings and emotions in their faces, all the power in that portrait composed of the rage, desperation and strength that had driven them to resist during three days on strike, supported by 40,000 construction workers. After she had sent the photo to the newspaper to illustrate the news item, the editor, Manolo Vázquez Montalbán rang her: “Pilar, do you know what picture you’ve taken? It’s a portrait of the most important group of union leaders in the underground! I don’t know if we can publish it”. But it was eventually published and those faces saw the light of day.
Pilar, as a journalist, is still a portrait artist. Her gallery of portraits shows three generations of Catalans whose faces were unknown to their people and thanks to her they came out of the underground. Those portraits were the required photographs, which she collected with loyalty and affection accompanied by her inseparable friend Montserrat Roig. The photos that she would never have refused to take.
Laura Tarré
Vilanova i la Geltrú, April 2012