The Glorieta Uno Room, located in the Murcia City Hall, offers from today until July 2 an approach to the life of the Murcians between the decades of the fifties and the eighties of the last century through the exhibition ‘Collective memory. Municipal Archive of Murcia-Images from the ‘Fotos López’ collection. A sample with which a transversal project started in 2022 is culminated and which is derived from the work commission carried out, by the Municipal Archive of Murcia, to the Photographic Research Laboratory of the University of Murcia, LIFUM, for the digitization of part of his photographic background.
A project that has undertaken the processing of 10,109 black and white negatives, with formats such as: 35 mm, 6×6 cm, 6×9 cm and 9×12 cm, all of them on celluloid.
The 46 photographs that are part of this exhibition are taken from the ‘Fotos López’ collection. “Some exercises that eloquently expose the value they have as a document of anthropological, cultural and, in some cases, plastic characteristics”, indicates the curator of the exhibition, José Fernando Vázquez Casillas.
Snapshots are organized into three sections. «Obviously, such a large file can be organized by different and complex classifications. The numerous themes and iconographies that make it up, consequently propose broad categorizations. However, the fact of being part of a specific culture, such as Murcia, leads us to choose three subjects for their social approach”, explains the PhD in Art History and Fine Arts from the University of Murcia. These are: the city; society and culture; and traditions, sports and events. The photographs define “with multiple meanings the work carried out by the photojournalists who carried out their work,” says Vázquez.
learning school
Regarding Fotos López, the curator explains that “it was a commercial company dedicated to the sale of photographic material and its processing, and to the production of industrial and photojournalistic images, from the 1930s to the 1980s.”
A company formed in 1935 by Juan and Gabriel López Hernández and located on Calle González Adalid, “possibly at number 1,” says the curator of the sample. From this first location “they set up a high-quality brand that soon stands out within the trade.” The business moved in 1940 to another point in the town, specifically to number 3 Trapería street. There, the Fotos López store-laboratory has been active for more than forty years. «During all this time, his premises, thanks to the professionalism of the technicians that make up the team, become the space from which a significant part of our history of graphic reporting is projected. And as a derivation, in a social reference and in an excellent school of learning”, says the expert.
During the different stages, photographers such as Nicolás Leal Rodríguez, Enrique Gomicia Cantos –and his brothers Pepe and Ángel–, Juan Moreno Belda, Tomás Alarcón Liza, Manuel Córcoles Rodríguez, Ángel Martínez Requiel and Francisco Carrión Cerezuela were trained under this firm. “The important productivity developed in its more than four decades, as well as the transcendental group of architects that make it up -with different responsibilities-, results in the creation of a vast collection of images,” says the person in charge of the exhibition about these images. who act as “witnesses to the ordinary and extraordinary events of our past.”
#witnesses