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Henri Cartier-Bresson said that "to photograph is to place the head, the eye and the heart on the same axis". In this sense, Isabel Steva Hernández 'Colita' agreed with the premise of the French photographer and co-founder of the Magnum agency. Over the course of four decades, Colita's lens x-rayed the daily life of a Barcelona where whores and stoners strolled through the unhealthy streets of Chinatown and gypsies raised the art of flamenco among the barracks of El Somorrostro.

In that swarm of miserable experiences emerged the colossal Carmen Amaya, whom a twenty-year-old Colita immortalized in Los tarantos (1963), by Rovira Beleta, which was the third nomination for Spain at the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. The cultural promoter Paco Revés, who discovered La Chunga (87), gave him his first remuneration to portray the gypsies who figured in the film and, curiously, Carmen Amaya was the second. The friendship between the two women lasted until the dancer's death months after filming ended.

Colita's passion for the gypsy people is part of a modus vivendi et operandi that reached its peak with the book Luces y sombras del flamenco (Lights and Shadows of Flamenco) and that veered for a few years towards the poshest shop window in the city, where a mixture of olympiens were exhibited in what was called the Gauche Divine. This cultural movement had as its owner the entrepreneur Oriol Regàs, creator of the Bocaccio nightclub where the intelligentsia and the art of the left met, such as the editors Carlos Barral and Jorge Herralde, the actresses Teresa Gimpera, and Serena Bergano, the architects Federico Correa and Ricardo Bofill, the writers Gabriel García Márquez and Terenci Moix, the singer Joan Manuel Serrat and the photographers Oriol Maspons and Xavier Miserachs, his teachers.

The testimony of Teresa Gimpera

Colita's gaze fell on them. It extracted their souls. "She had an incredible sense of humor, she was very kind, intelligent, wise and cultured. And on top of that, he loved animals. In fact, when one of my dogs died, he told me to bury the ashes in the garden of his house," his soul friend Teresa Gimpera (87) recalls to LOC. Both were neighbours in Begur, which led to their relationship being further cemented. He has countless anecdotes with her. "One day when we had a little too much to drink, I was driving and she was telling me 'straight ahead, now to the right...'" She has been the only one who managed to get Gimpera to move away from advertising customs, "because in her studio she took the only sexy and daring photos I have and that caused her some problems with the police due to censorship. None of us made any money and everything was done at home, without makeup or costumes."

She didn't like to be defined only as the photographer of the Gauche Divine. He was also a member of the Barcelona School and the Nova Cançó, where his friendship with Serrat (80) took root, for whom he took photos of his emblematic Mediterranean. The two met publicly for the last time when in April last year the cultural intermediary received the Christa Leem award, created by cultural agitator Joan Estrada. He stressed that "I have never heard someone speak ill of her, she was very funny and had a great rearness".

She was very excited about the award because he was as much a Barcelona as she was and both represent progressivism, leftism, non-nationalism and the fight for women's rights and the LGTBI collective. Had it not been for the fact that Estrada is preparing a documentary about the photographer Javier Inés, a portraitist of pre-Olympic Barcelona who died of AIDS in 1991, Colita would not have been the recipient. "I called her to do the two-minute teaser," says Estrada, "because she knew Javier very well. And while we were talking, he pulled me out of an envelope with some unpublished photos of Christa Leem. And then I blurted it out: 'Would you accept the prize?' Serrat praised his presence and Miquel Iceta, whom he affectionately called "my chubby minister", presented him with the award.

Colita was very much from the neighborhood. He lived on a ground floor in Sants where he blended in with the future of the plebs. She, who had so often rubbed shoulders with the divine, belonged to the mortal side. Blessed was the time when her father gave her her first camera as a child. He wanted her to be a pharmacist, but without being aware of it, he dynamited that dream because Isabel would be a photographer and journalist. He owes his nickname to his father. On one occasion he told her that he had been born under a cabbage.

Jorge Herralde with his 'secretaries' Coral Majó and Anna BohigasColita

"Colita hung up her cameras in 2003, but she didn't hang her gaze," says her friend Francesc Polop, director of her personal archive in which almost 30% of her work rests, in which hits such as Gabriel García Márquez with one of his books on his head, a close-up of Orson Welles or Carmen Amaya with her hat looking at the camera stand out. On February 29, the exhibition in memoriam Antifémina, curated by Polop and based on her homonymous photobook, considered the first of its kind in the feminist history of Spain, will be inaugurated at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. "She possessed great clairvoyance, sagacity and an incredible sense of humour," recalls this sculptor and graphic designer who has been a friend of the winner of the 2021 Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts for just over four decades. Faithful to these axes exposed a few lines above, Colita rejected the 2014 National Photography Award when he sent a letter to José Ignacio Wert (73), Minister of Education, Culture and Sport in which he emphasized that "for the time being, Mr. Wert, I don't want to be with you in the photo because the situation of culture and education in Spain is a shame."

The photographer was concerned that her art would endure through the ages. The remaining 70% of his images are in the National Archive of Catalonia, the Municipal Archive of Barcelona, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, his cinematographic work is in the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the performing arts part in the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona... A few hours before the bells rang, he died at the age of 83 from peritonitis.

  • Barcelona
  • Joan Manuel Serrat
  • Gabriel García Márquez