The Foto Colectiva group, headed by its coordinators Francisco Gálvez, Ramón Peco and Manuel Ruiz Toribio, met last Friday at the former Convent de la Merced in Ciudad Real to present the first issue of its photography magazine, which bears the same name.
The magazine was one of the objectives of the project. Francisco Gálvez defended the idea that the printed support continues to be the most representative of this discipline, since paper brings together tradition and avant-garde, on the one hand, and classicism and modernity, on the other, and it is the material that is handled in newspaper archives. , which save for posterity the works of each era.
Manuel Ruiz Toribio gave a short conference, where he cited the four groups that have had the greatest influence on the future of Foto Colectiva: the New York Photo League cooperative, the Peruvian Social Photography Workshops, the Almeria Photographic Association and La Palangana, the latter a excision of the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid.
He also recalled that the four corporations had a special interest in modernizing social and documentary photography, focusing on reflecting the lives of ordinary people and making a citizen chronicle that went beyond the limits of large cities.
Next, Ramón Peco explained the importance of humor in photography and made several comparisons between the methods that have been used at different times to unite both aspects. In this sense, he focused on memes, that is, those internet images that reflect a certain situation and that have become contemporary topics due to their ease of dissemination and their massive reach.
Likewise, Peco encouraged the public to search for an unprejudiced gaze and recalled the theory of the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp, who insisted on pointing out that the transcendence of art was far above the stipulated criteria of good and bad taste.
‘Photo Colectiva’ was born with the support of several Ciudad Real photographers, some of them historical members of the old photographic collective ‘Alumbre’, as is the case of two of its promoters, Ramón Peco and Manuel Ruiz Toribio, and others who are independent and participate of this initial issue, such as Francisco Gálvez, Marian Gascón, Pablo Lorente or Jesús Monroy.
The other names come from different cities in Spain, such as Míguel Acera, from Bilbao; Ricardo Cases, from Alicante; Marisa García, from San Fernando, Cádiz; Javier López del Cerro, from Murcia; and Marian Venceslá and Manuela Martínez, from Albacete.
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