A hard, merciless light

A hard, merciless light. The worker-photography movement, 1926-1963. From 6 April - 22 August 2011.

Jorge Ribalta, curator: The word ‘worker’ isn’t part of our language. Obviously it’s a story of losers and the defeated. The idea of the documentary as the art of social democracy helped to determine the structure of a documentary culture in the 1930s, but it wasn’t the only one and maybe not even the first. Before that, there was a documentary movement tied to the international communist movement, based on self-representation.

It was a counter-model to bourgeois representation, based on self-representation and taking control of representation as part of the revolutionary project.

The goal of revolution is self-government. The structure of the exhibition is undemocratic, just like the structure of a museum. A museum speaks in the name of others.

The two great pillars of a museum are the author and the original work. This exhibition has work that is both collective and anonymous, although there are also individual pieces. It’s a joint project created for the media and not for a museum.

We don’t have to be so simplistic about the fact that putting this exhibition in a museum amounts to a complete depoliticisation of the work. I think that museum space is also a public, political space and this exhibition politicises the museum space in its own way.

Talking about a revolutionary movement, which is by definition anti-bourgeois, does not invalidate the good aspects of bourgeois public spaces.

It’s difficult to transpose the 1930s concept of the proletariat to our times. The word ‘worker’ isn’t part of our language, because it designates a social group that we really don’t know how to identify now.
I hope the exhibition shows the need for images in political struggles.

One of the difficulties today is identifying the new types of scarcity that continue to proliferate. The crisis of capitalism is clearly intensifying right now, although it’s difficult to identify the subjects of these new types of scarcity.

I agree that we have to recognise the new types of poverty, which are not like the 1930s, but at the same time we have to construct other kinds of concepts and representations because this type of language doesn’t work. We can’t think about democracy without some form of representation tied to the documentary tradition.

The rules of the game are to show the original work, which is related to the culture of positivism and empiricism. The original is the document, the proof of the historical narrative.

But I think that the exhibition is interesting and has a function. The exhibition is a space of dreams and sensations. It’s a space for the body, which must not be forgotten, because without the body, we can’t learn. If we don’t have sensations, and translate conflicts into sensations, we can’t understand them.