Audioguide “"Jordi Socías"

We welcome you to the Canal de Isabel II Room and the exhibition “Jordi Socías. At the end of the getaway”, an exhibition dedicated to a key figure in recent Spanish photography.

Throughout a prolific career of more than fifty years, Socías has contributed her personal perspective to genres such as reportage, portraiture and street photography, perhaps one of her most unknown facets but one of her great passions.

In addition, he has participated as a graphic editor in important media outlets, highlighting his work of more than two decades for El País.

At the end of the getaway it is not a typical retrospective exhibition. It takes its title from the classic New Wave film. Socías himself mentions said feature film in an interview for the magazine Red eyes in which he comments:

“This film initially lasted more than three hours and in editing it was reduced to an hour and a half, and it is very curious because the editing is built based on cuts of shots that introduced a new language to cinema. This influenced me a lot and I am indeed a child of the Nouvelle vague. Furthermore, I reaffirm myself more and more.”

This exhibition unfolds before us as a sequence composed of almost a hundred images. In it the author, accompanied by curator Lucía Laín, acts as editor of his own work, reviewing his extensive catalog and establishing aesthetic or thematic connections between disparate works. The way the images are presented in the exhibition creates a dialogue that promotes new readings while offering a review of the highlights of his career.

The exhibition also presents a selection of books and magazines that reflect his work as a photographer and editor, and a video that allows us to delve deeper into the visual universe of Jordi Socías.

Several people walk through an open field in this image taken in the Bellvitge neighborhood, on the outskirts of Barcelona. In the background we glimpse how a series of buildings are gaining ground, suggesting that this is probably a very different scenario today. In the middle of this panorama, a building emerges marked with the label “CINE LUMIERE”, an unexpected tribute to the inventors of cinema that contrasts with the humble surroundings.

Jordi Socías was born in 1945 into a working family in Barcelona, ​​in a neighborhood not very different from this one. Two aspects of his childhood are visible in this image: the street, the playground that over time would become a key setting for his photos, and the cinema, which as a child he contemplated clandestinely and which would end up taking him, indirectly, , to the world of photography.

However, Jordi Socías would not pick up a camera until he was 25 years old. His first introduction to the world of photography came, anecdotally, through a correspondence course, and, above all, more significantly, from his first trip to Paris in 1972.

Although at the time of taking this photo he had already started collaborating with the weekly Change 16 and some Catalan newspapers, it was this image that marked a turning point in his career. As he himself says:

Taking a photograph is making a series of decisions, and when I saw this photograph, what I had decided to include in the image, the way to construct it... that's when I thought I could be a photographer, from here I decided that I was going to dedicate myself to this.

This photograph was taken at an Act for Freedom held in Barcelona at a time when, with the incipient democracy, symbols and traditions prohibited during the Franco regime were recovered. First published in Change 16, is perhaps one of the most notable in Jordi Socías' career and one of the most experimental.

Beyond the symbolic value of the scene, the image is taken with an aesthetic intention, almost as if it were a portrait of the flag. Socías uses blur to capture the movement of the fluttering fabric and convey the sensation of instantaneity, one of the great challenges for a photographer. At the same time, with accurate framing he allows us to glimpse the face of the bearer, who we assume is immersed in a crowd of people.

Since his time as a reporter, Jordi Socías has always shown his own perspective, capable of turning news into an artistic work. In his role as a reporter you can already see the look of the portraitist and the street photographer.

I think that by taking photos I maintain this style quite intense, a little disturbing, a little ironic and a little surreal, which would be my three ways of seeing photography.

In this image we witness an intriguing scene. Inside an apartment, sitting on the sofa, we see two characters: a man posing with a camera, the self-portraited photographer himself, and a huge bear in a very friendly attitude towards him.

However Fierce, which is the name of the animal, is no ordinary bear. He is an actor dressed for the filming of the film of the same name. The photograph is a good example of Jordi Socías' sense of humor, an important part of his character and many of his images.

That boy, fascinated by films, who as a young man organized cineforums in Barcelona, ​​began working for the world of cinema in 1980. Since then, Socías has participated, as a still photo or as a guest photographer on set, in dozens of films, collaborating with filmmakers. such as Fernando Trueba, Pedro Almodóvar or Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, the director of Fierce.

Although one of the best-known facets of his work is the portrait genre, curiously he has barely cultivated the self-portrait. Another example can be seen in the exhibition, A reverse epitaph, an image also full of humor despite being taken during his convalescence after heart surgery.

Without a doubt, his work as a portrait painter is one of Jordi Socías' most notable ones. In this image he immortalizes the American writer Susan Sontag, author of About photography, one of the most important essays on this artistic discipline.

The naturalness and closeness that Sontag's image gives off says a lot about Socías' way of working, in which observation and the ability to recognize the “decisive moment” predominate.

When I take portraits I don't talk. Just enough. I try not to disturb. Almost always in front of a photographer, great cultural personalities transform into very submissive people, who wait for you to tell them what to do. And they just have to be. The more natural, the better. And what I always direct is the gaze, the direction of the gaze is fundamental.

The image was taken as part of an interview for the first issue of the magazine The European, a magazine about cultural trends in whose creation Jordi Socías participated. And, in addition to working for important media outlets, Socías himself has contributed to the history of Spanish journalism by founding his own projects.

His work as a portrait painter, which would continue for more than two decades in The weekly country, has given him the opportunity to photograph the most interesting figures on the national and international cultural scene. Few photographers could boast of having images of Jorge Luis Borges, Francis Ford Coppola or Marina Abramović in their catalogue, to name just a few of those we can see in the exhibition.

This spectacular image of a young Antonio Banderas is taken from the terrace of the photographer's former apartment on Ortega y Gasset Street. During a visit, the actor suggested climbing the sign of the Fantasio cinema, which has now disappeared. Surprise and fear did not prevent Socías from taking his camera to immortalize this premonitory scene of Banderas conquering the top of the film world.

Many of my sitters have passed through that terrace. It was a good setting that allowed me to work with natural light. Penélope Cruz's photograph is also taken there.

The image is taken in the 1980s, a time when many of the artists linked to the Madrid Movida paraded before Socías' camera. At that stage he especially highlighted his work as editor and photographer for the magazine Madrid kills me, one of the most innovative publishing projects, despite its short life, on the national scene.

It is still significant that Socías lived in Madrid in a building occupied on the ground floor by a cinema. His passion for this medium led him to found the magazine in 1995 Cinemania, which would become one of the most important publications on that topic in Spain. As we see, Jordi Socías' footprint is behind many of the most relevant editorial projects of our time.

This unique image is a collaboration between Jordi Socías and two of the most important contemporary Spanish artists. Both had been previously portrayed by the photographer, but this session is good proof of the ingenuity and sense of humor that both the author and those represented exude.

On the left, the painter Luis Gordillo hides behind a mask that, paradoxically, shows his own face, since it was made from a previous portrait, also the work of Socías. The characteristic Mickey mouse ears have been added to the mask. He shakes the hand of Eduardo Arroyo, also a painter, who appears dressed in a suit but made up like a poor and sad clown.

The game proposed by the photographer was not limited to this image. The two artists even took to the streets in this way and this experience was the starting point for a joint exhibition.

The author chose Gordillo and Arroyo for their talent and personality, which would allow him to give free rein to one of his passions, surrealist photography. Jordi Socías' work has multiple facets and one of them is undoubtedly the presence of humor and absurdity:

A photograph is composed of many observations and the set of those observations is an image. From that language you transmit sensations, situations and emotions, and a certain air of surrealism that reality has, in short the mystery of photography.

As part of his work in El País, in 2011 Socías was sent to cover the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. An earthquake and tsunami had devastated the Japanese east coast, affecting the Fukushima prefecture and damaging several nuclear reactors. In the days after the event, radiation forced the government to declare an evacuation zone within a twenty-kilometer radius, evacuating more than 150.000 residents.

As a result of this disaster, the places that were abandoned became ghost towns, creating a disconcerting and desolate landscape. In this photograph, a man transports some objects on his bicycle, perhaps collected from one of the many buildings that, like the one we see in the background, are miraculously supported by his ruined skeleton.

The use of color to carry out this work is especially interesting. For Socías, color has a more narrative quality, ideal for the series of images that accompanied this extensive report, published in The weekly country in two consecutive weeks. Black and white, on the other hand, predominates in his work, especially when it comes to more personal works:

Black and white helps me interpret reality, or rather, what I see, erasing the trace of time from it, in my own way. It is more sophisticated, expressive and has a tone between poetic and historical.

Socías traveled to Japan accompanied by the writer and friend Juan José Millás, with whom he has collaborated on more occasions. In the exhibition we can see the journalist portrayed in another image taken in Tokyo during the same report.