Itinerant Subjects
The image passes us by. We have to follow its movement as far as possible, but we must also accept that we can never entirely possess it.
—Georges Didi-Huberman
No art has captured such a large number of people as photography. But as the camera wanders, so do its subjects, whether streetwalkers, pedestrians, migrants, or illegal border crossers. This section includes works by some of the most powerful street photographers in Spain and Latin America—including the Catalonian expressionist Joan Colom and the Mexican photographers Elsa Medina and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, who use the lens as a political instrument to register everyday life and the impact of urban modernization. They employ a variety of strategies to capture moving subjects, from abstract composition and repetition to the creation of narrative series. Suggesting a relation between walking (or dancing) and photographic modes of seeing, between human movement and the camera’s agility, ambulatory subjects represent the movement of photography itself.
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Fiesta Mayor
Fiesta Mayor, 1960 -
Gente de la calle (People on the street)
Gente de la calle (People on the street), 1958–64 -
Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (Angel woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico)
Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (Angel woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico), 1979, printed later