They bear witness to events of the past and highlight the beauty of monuments and landscapes. Nor do they ignore these other more modest corners, daily life in the countryside, the markets or the daily life of the cities with its anonymous protagonists. The Provincial Historical Archives They are associated with bundles and written documents, but they often preserve memory in the form of images. Far from being limited to the custody of more “administrative” photographs, its collections include collections of incontestable artistic value, as well as testimonial value. The centers, managed by the Government of Castilla y León since 1986, preserve photographic repertoires as rich as they are surprising, either in deposit, or in donations or transfers.
The Palencia Historical Archives has among its collections those of Álvaro de Castro (father and son) and Tonino. Álvaro de Castro Cea (with a permanent exhibition in the old Clemencia hospital in Ampudia) ran a canteen and a grocery store in the town of Palencia and expanded his business with three sets through which at the time all the neighbors passed to take a photo of the DNI or the family record book, but also other more artistic ones, » says archival photographer, Inmaculada San José Negro. To the 2,000 glass and celluloid plates of the initiator of the saga, dated between the first decade of the 20th century and 1945, are added 10,000 of the continuator, Álvaro de Castro del Bosque. The son, who is already starting to go out, “addresses everything that the father had not discussed: the festivals, the landscape, the country, life, customs, the ‘BBC’ (weddings, baptisms and communions), the quints, processions…”, until the end of the seventies.
That of Tonino (Antonino Hernández Romojaro) shows a radically different setting, composed of imaginative studio photographs, belonging to a collection of 100,000 negatives, of which 30,000 have already been digitized. The author arrived in Palencia at a very young age, from Toledo, to work in the arms factory, where he learned the profession of photographer. He eventually opened a studio, where he applied intuitive lighting and composition techniques to film, of which he was a big fan, says Inmaculada San José. “It was cheaper than others, young people, boys and girls, will spend the afternoon at Tonino’s, to have a good time. These are not typical portrait photos, but rather group photos. He photographs women as if they were Hollywood artists.
The Historical Archives of Palencia, which developed the project ‘Your photographs are also history’ to recover the funds of the photographers of the city and the province and the family collections, it houses other funds, such as that of the Alonso brothers or that of Fernando Bellver Acevedo, Spanish television correspondent who had a store in the city and including an exhibition which will constitute a chronicle of Palencia between the sixties and eighties of the last century.
The Salamanca Archives draw photographically from more official images, generally of unknown author, with funds such as those of the Women’s Section, the Youth Front, the National Institute of Housing and Civil Government, “constituted for administrative purposes”, explains its director, Cristina Vicente López . The work of renowned photographers from the city is preserved in the Cinematheque of Castilla y León. However, the transfer of rights to a unique collection from Dutch photographer Flip Franssen is being finalized, who “traveled to Salamanca for a Spanish course in 1988 and photographed the city and its surroundings.” It was the author who recently contacted the Junta de Castilla y León with the intention of exhibiting them and considered ceding the rights to the images.
Franssen’s gaze does not allow itself to be fascinated by the monumental, but rather moves towards the periphery, towards Chinatown or San Vicente or stops at “daily life, at the market…”. There are 106 images which “are very interesting”, says the head of the Archives; around fifty of them were exhibited at the center between April and August this year. Another selection of photos, those of the Pizarrales neighborhood of the National Housing Institute, is exhibited on the second floor of its headquarters.
In the Historical Archives of Soria, photographic funds are kept which cover the penultimate decade of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century: 52,000 images currently inventoried, explains the center’s photographer-microfilmer, María López Morales. Among the early authors, Agapito Casado stands out, who arrived from Burgos and continued his studies between 1887 and 1896, which his widow and son continued after his death (until 1936); Aurelio Rioja de Pablo, who also practiced in Granada and Madrid and worked in Soria between 1908 and 1949, and the authors of the Carrascosa Archives, the first to arrive at the center managed by the Ministry of Culture. In this last study, “which was in reality a pharmacy”, Teodoro Ramírez (1888-1902), Tiburcio Crespo (1918-1950) and Salvador Álvarez and Amador Carrascosa, between the fifties and sixties.
Monumental photography occupies a special place in this collection, since the Carrascosa laboratory was commissioned by the Monuments Commission to capture the province’s heritage in images. Between 1945 and 1975, the reality of Soria had an exceptional witness, Salvador Vives, as well as the provincial photographer Manuel Lafuente Caloto, whose work covers the second half of the 20th century. The Soria center is exhibiting these days in its 1948 headquarters. Atauta through the glass’, a summer report by a Barcelona doctor passionate about photography, Lluis Carrasco i Formiguera, made in the town of Soria to which the title alludes to where one of its employees comes from.
The first Provincial Historical Archives created in Castile and León (in 1931), those of Ávila, Among its photographic assets is the Foto Estudio Mimosa collection.settled in the city in the middle of the last century and specialized in gallery snapshots, or archives of Ángel Guerras, Jesús Fernández de Andrés, Rufino García Muñoz and Rufino González Díaz. Through them different stages of life in the city and in the provinces are reflected. From the pharmacist Jesús Fernández Andrés is preserved the gift made by his grandson of 63 stereoscopic glass plates, “especially of Velayos, of his city and his travels”, details the photographer of the center, Reyes López Grande; by Ángel Guerras, an album of the streets of Ávila in the 1920s and glass plates with images of other places where his military profession took him; by Rufino García Muñoz, landscapes, countryside and monuments between 1904 and 1911, and by Rufino González Díaz, from Madrigal de las Altas Torres, a collection of family photos from the sixties and seventies.
All of this content, as well as that of the five other Community centers, will soon have a shared access and distribution tool. “From the General Archives, the Provincial Archives and the Cinematheque we have been working on a website for a while where users can consult the descriptions not only of the photographic collections, but of all the documentary collections of the centers, and from where to share images that do not have intellectual property rights or that have been transferred”, explains the head of the Service of the Archives. and director of the General Archives of Castilla y León, Aitana Alba Barba, firstly, we must face all the previous description and this “almost implies a historical investigation” also in the field of photography, which “historically has been. little studied and we are now giving it the value it deserves.
