Interview (2017) Carlos Pérez Siquier: "I will die with the photos on"
"Photography is my way of prolonging life," he liked to say.
Carlos Pérez Siquier
died in Almería at the
age of 90
. I mean this:
one of the Rolling Stones of Spanish photography
has passed away
.
He formed a band with
Oriol Maspons, Ramón Masats, Ricardo Terré, Gabriel Cualladó, Xavier Miserachs, Joan Colom ...
They, and many others, consolidated a way of looking at Spain, of framing it, of guessing its sunlight and bacon. They established a second graphic vanguard in a country where the 600, the refrigerator and the Development Plans left castor oil and green louse behind. A Spain of priests in cassocks, of impoverished neighborhoods, of first bursts of the Yey, of processions and OJE camps.
Of that unbalanced country these men remembered live with a camera slung over their shoulders.
Now only the unbeatable
Ramón Masats
remains standing
.
Carlos Pérez Siquier launched the
Afal
photography and film
magazine
in 1956, an avant-garde tool, a shelter for those who made the job of taking photos more than an album, something more than a repertoire in black and white to remember.
They were
a European vanguard on the fringes of almost everything.
They not only portrayed a Spain against the light, but they deciphered it from
Afal
celebrating and denouncing painful realities, folklores, customs, goodness, poverty, 'glamor', failures and desires.
And all that was promoted by Pérez Siquier from Almería, one of the hidden cities of the south.
He worked at Banco Santander from Monday to Friday. He was a guy with one of those
double lives needed to be able to turn to what mattered.
A ferret of scenes. An enlightened hunter. He spent 30 years of life in the bank until in 1985 he dedicated himself only to taking photos and this continued until this summer.
Up to 90 years.
At the end of the 70s he amplified his work. Since then his obsession has been color. A powerful color. The seas of Siquier are a splendid blue and surpassing itself. He taught us the principle of coastal tourism that invades everything, but rather the unusual truths of Cabo de Gata, which elevates everything. "Photography is a groping search from accident to transcendence."
A few years ago he published a little book,
My shadow I
, where he effectively portrays his shadow and himself. Pictures taken with one of those eighties tourist cameras that installed on his cornea becomes a generator of audacity. But one of his great works are
the portraits of La Chanca,
the marginal neighborhood of Almería where he spent several years portraying the people who occupy it, the misery and goodness of an extreme world. These photos were written by
Juan Goytisolo.
"I have been guided by intuition. Look and be amazed afterwards. This is how it works. Photography can only be explained after it happens. Before a photograph there is only speculation."
Having him around was a sight.
Loyal in the mid-afternoon observation of that Mediterranean that he deciphered so well at the foot of the wave or from the terrace of his house in Almería. With the violinist's white mane split in two, very smooth and combed on one side and the other of the skull. A wave of silver left behind her neck, a handsome loop. You had to see him look with eyes of clever and perhaps shy outspoken. Observing from the bottom of a very alive optic nerve. The canvas of the face, dark. The electric word, the hands with a trace of that tear left by the ice of a
gin toni
c on the glass of the glass. He was in the picture as a colt. He had a lot of
rock and roll
in his blood
until the last minute
. He was born in 1930. How much he loved poetry.
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