Linda Lashford
We were travelling south through the borderlands of Extremadura, a granite hard place on the western edge of Spain. Stretching ahead of us was dehesa; acres of dry, bouldered pasture, shaded by a child’s drawing of regularly spaced oaks, clipped and shaped by the upward graze of cattle. This has always been a poor place, a place of thin soils and marginal existence. So poor that in the Age of Discovery the villages, with little to lose, disgorged an army of conquistadors. Those that returned brought Inca gold, and in one brief burst of prosperity changed the landscape, imposing incongruous, palatial architecture on a raft of impoverished villages. Us photographers may also know it as the origin of Eugene Smith’s lauded 1950 photo essay, ‘The Spanish Village’.
As David, my partner, and I travelled south, Smith’s potent images of rural life and poverty under the Franco dictatorship preoccupied me. It was 2012, four years on from the financial tsunami that swept through much of Europe and devastated the economies of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. The people of Extremadura, as in our own Andalucían village some 250 miles beyond, were still struggling with its aftermath. More than a third of the population were out of work and youth unemployment was even higher. In our own mountain village, the first change that I had noticed was the withdrawal of credit in the local shop. A stark notice announced the end of tick, and in the valley that stretched below us, land that had been left fallow for decades, was turned, tilled and planted. I heard that the Spanish Red Cross had delivered a clutch of parcels and that a man from the town below had walked up the old stone, Roman road and asked for help to feed his family. David’s daughter had given up on finding employment and left to try and make a life in Central America. The distress was palpable but nothing we were experiencing touched the depth of material poverty portrayed in the ‘Spanish Village’.
Smith’s photo essay was made at a moment when the United States was re-considering its relationship with Franco’s Spain. Franco’s policy of autarky had failed miserably, the population was hungry and the state badly needed economic aid. And America with its own agenda, saw an opening to extend its military presence in Europe. A report on the Spanish food crisis was considered one way to favourably influence American public opinion and Smith was commissioned by Life magazine to report on the problems of the Spanish food supply. So, fourteen years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Smith crossed into Spain with an assistant and interpreter. For the Spanish people, these had been fourteen long and bitter years of political persecution, civil repression, international isolation and economic state control. The pre-war land reforms envisaged by the Republicans had been abandoned and power was back in the hands of the large landed estates. Franco’s fascist government controlled the food supply, sequestering supplies and fixing prices. Poverty and hunger was rife, the black market buoyant. These were the ‘hunger years’.
Moved by his encounters, Smith determined to convey the depth of rural poverty and deprivation. After a month of travelling through the country, he settled on the village of Deleitosa to tell his story. Set against a backdrop of dirt streets and stone houses, we can see that the villagers, especially the women, are gaunt, their malnourished faces accentuated by the cast shadows of a harsh sun. In a backbreaking endeavour, shallow soils are tilled with wooden ploughs. A child sweeps the streets to collect dung for fertiliser, a woman kicks open a door, taking her loaves to the communal bakery. A family squatting on an unpaved floor eats from a central bowl and, in perhaps the essay’s most enduring image, the hard, repressive faces of the Franco’s Guardia Civil look on.
Arriving at Deleitosa I was immediately struck by how little the street plan had changed from Smith’s original placement image. The entrance still pivots around the central viewpoint of the Virgen de la Breña, two roads running away on either side. Over the years, the stone and mud-encrusted dwellings have been rendered and whitewashed. A scattering of newer, double storied houses have been constructed by emigrants who, having prospered abroad, have returned to live out their retirement. Wandering down c/Eugene Smith with my camera slung around my neck, I’m a recognisable species. A man stops and greets me and introduces me to an elderly couple. The wife, in her eighties, is old enough to remember Eugene Smith and the disturbance his photography created in the village.
‘He didn’t live here’, she says a bit dismissively. ‘He came each day from Trujillo in a car and paid a local man to be his guide’. Inviting me into their house, she takes out an old magazine that had published some of the images and recalls how things have changed. ‘After the Life Magazine article was published, people came from all over’ she says. She tells me that the extraordinarily beautiful girl Josefa, who is illuminated at the heart of the image ‘Spanish wake’, was the daughter of the local schoolteacher (….’so beautiful because the family was well enough off to spare her a hard life in the fields’), and was inundated with admiring letters. Amongst them were some from an ardent American whom I’m told Josefa thought would marry her. Sadly he never came. Some say it was because her family opposed the match, but I’m left unsure. Whatever happened, Josefa left the village and made a new life for herself in Catalunya, but never married.
I’m taken to the house, where in Smith’s photograph, a woman sits, spinning flax. ‘Her son was also ashamed’ the woman says, ‘he hated the idea of his mother’s picture on display and went to the museum to try and get it back. But they said he couldn’t afford it’, she adds. Then referring to the image of a family spooning food from a pan on the dirt floor she becomes indignant: ‘we were never like that, we never ate off the floor, that family was paid to pose’.
To hear such claims is painful. Could some of these images have been arranged to promote Smith’s particular point of view or am I hearing the response of a community who years on feels ashamed and rejects its past? A bit of both I imagine, and I remind myself that the Spanish village is a collective unit with a culture based on honour, and one in which dishonour and consequently shame is a powerful and shared emotion. Moreover, the probability that many of the villagers would not have seen these pictures contemperaneously might even have worsened the situation; the passage of time, education and emigration only serving to illuminate the (shameful) depth of their historic deprivation. However, it is also true that some of the images were manipulated during the printing (most infamously the dodging and burning to alter the sight lines in ‘the Wake’), and that Eugene Smith was at least open to the idea of staging his photographs if it aided his passionately and sincerely held point of view. Like many photographers of his time Smith saw his job to tell a larger truth. This doesn’t placate many of the villagers, who see it as evidence of Smith’s mendacity.
The point of this ramble is not to examine the ethics and veracity of ‘Spanish Village’, a classic, important and influential photo-essay that happens to fall short of the current exacting standards in photo-journalism, but to pause for a moment and to acknowledge the potential impact of our photography on the people at its centre and how its effects might unexpectedly ripple down through time, on family members and on a community. It’s worth reminding ourselves that there are three people in the photographic relationship, the photographer, the viewer and the photographed. Whilst travelling in Morocco, I was reminded of this and the contemporary relevance of the Deleitosa experience when a young Arab girl agreed to pose for a portrait. Returning home she spoke with her family who were horrified. They called a family conference, and in an echo of Josefa, expressed concern that should her image leak out into social media, she would be rendered unmarriageable. One casual upload could so easily have destroyed a life.
It’s encounters such as these that help to shape our practice. Deleitosa and Morocco have certainly changed mine and prompted me to consider more carefully the integrity, purpose and cultural context of every image I take. To cease candid photography and to move towards consensual image making, preferably in projects where I can build a relationship with the person at the centre of the photograph. It’s been a challenging transition, but having embarked upon it there are also many new possibilities, not least amongst them to think about how to give voice not just to me, the photographer, but to the person at the heart of the image.
Footnote: Extremadura is a fascinating, but little visited place. It contains the great Roman amphitheatre of Mérida and the amazing architectural legacy of the conquistadors, best seen in Trujillo where Eugene Smith lived during the making of ‘the Spanish Village’. Since the recession of 2008, the region has lost 976 businesses and 38,000 people since 2012, many of them young. Almost 40% of the population live on just 700€ (£630) per month.
You’ll find the Life photoessay and some interesting extras on the following links:
http://time.com/3876243/life-behind-the-picture-w-eugene-smiths-guardia-civil-1950/
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/spanish-wake
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