Photographic Culture and the Printed Page in 20th-Century Spain

Monographic course

The printed page has been the discursive public space par excellence of photography in modernity, and has created a new space for the image alongside models of the archive, on the one hand, and exhibition, on the other, qua dominant historical paradigms for the public visibility of images.
This course sets out to have a look at the main photographic publications in the Spanish state during the 20th century, both magazines and books.
In that respect, it is offered as a proposal for an alternative historiographical methodology that heeds the forms of circulation of images and doesn't restrict itself to a history of the authors or of isolated works typical of the formalist methodologies of modern art and its institutions.

Jordana Mendelson is the author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939, and co-author and co-curator of the catalogue and the exhibition Margaret Michaelis: Fotografía, vanguardia y política en la Barcelona de la República. She teaches in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of New York University.