The first retrospective of the work of Jorge Ribalta (Barcelona, 1963) comes to Madrid thanks to the University of Navarra and the Mapfre Foundation to look back on the long career of the versatile Catalan creator.
Ribalta’s figure is based on different axes: photographic practice, theory, criticism and curating. This first being the main protagonist of the exhibition Everything is true. Fictions and documents (1987-2020)which presents more than thirty years of professional career. The exhibition covers not only his photographic projects, but also his studies and contributions in the field of documentary research.
The retrospective is made up of fourteen analogue photographic series, four projections and documentary material which will be available at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid until May 8, 2022.
Is everything true?
The idea for this exhibition was born six years ago. Throughout this process, there have been various vicissitudes. Among them, the change of city of the exhibition – from Barcelona to Madrid – or the death of its co-curator, Julián Rodríguez, also editor-in-chief of Periférica, who gave his name to the project. Title referring to the unfinished documentary It’s all truemade by Orson Welles between 1941 and 1943. Ribalta assures elDiario.es that the process of making this work was “partly painful, complicated and not even pleasant”. Until he finds a way to look at himself, to look at himself, to document himself. However, the artist believes that this development helped him come to terms with the beginning of his work and that it became “something therapeutic”.
Jorge Ribalta began photographing images in the 1980s. He began and continues to exhibit analog negatives which he reveals and develops himself. “Digital photography is not photography, it’s another medium,” says the creator. For the artist, the culture of the industrial era is latent in the analog. Ribalta rules out any nostalgia for photographic film but emphasizes the importance of the era and environment involved in analog photography, a very different workflow from the solitude of a darkroom to that of being in front of a screen. ‘computer. “The story is embedded in the work,” he says.
This first retrospective presents the work of the Barcelona artist in chronological order, from 1987 to 2020. “It brings together more than three decades of practice, research and photographic theory of Jorge Ribalta and, at the same time, constitutes a journey through the grammars and politics of the visual document in the Spanish context,” explains Valentín Roma, curator of the exhibition. Between 1987 and 1998, his creations consisted of small performances carried out in his workshop. This illusionism was prefabricated by the author through miniatures. From this handling step, samples such as Apocryphal prints which was inaugurated at the Primavera Fotografia festival in 1988. Work described as a revelation of the festival by Andy Grundberg, then critic for the New York Times.
The artist’s work experienced a split in 2005. His gaze mutated or rather changed location. From the poetics of his first stage in which, in the solitude of his analog laboratory, with the help of a plate camera, he recreated the world with characters, he began to carry out research abroad, which extends to today, within the framework of the documentary. These periods, hypothetically antagonistic, are questioned in Everything is true. Fictions and documents (1987-2020). For this second trip, Jorge Ribalta abandons the tripod that held his large format camera to work, usually, with a Rolleiflex 120mm or other medium format cameras.
Glancing subtly through his waist-mounted viewfinder, he photographed series like On the grassfruit of four editions of the Sónar music festival in Barcelona. Work in which the protagonist are not the artists but the public. People socializing and taking photos on artificial grass, becoming the real spectacle of the event. Among them, Ribalta, with an anachronistic device from the sixties which documents what is happening in gentrified Barcelona. This leisure ritual takes on a new meaning due to the suspension of public space caused by the COVID-19 lockdown.
Fiction versus documentary?
The antagonistic title of the exhibition underlines the blurred line that separates fiction and document. A question always latent in Ribalta’s work. “A needlessly totalitarian truth”, in the words of the exhibition curator. “This opposition, quite simplistic and Manichean, between an image constructed in a discourse in which photography is part, very typical of the 80s and 90s. Against the idea that photography tells the truth, which is the entire documentary tradition. In a certain way, we see how within photographic realism there is this dimension of fiction, of fantasy, of delirium and where this opposition, apparently clear, becomes less clear”, argues the artist.
One of the first cinematographic documentarians, the Scotsman John Grierson (1898-1972), defined documentary film as “the creative treatment of reality”. The director of Wanderers (1929) – translated by Drift fishermen–, like the protagonist of this article, has focused part of his work on the documentation of the working class. In Grierson’s case, herring fishermen in England in the 1920s.
In 2011, Jorge Ribalta presented at the Reina Sofía Museum a vast work on working-class photography from 1926 to 1939. “He traced the genealogy of the historical appearance of documentary discourse in the 1920s, in cinema and photography it is linked to those who worked class movements,” recalls the researcher. The documentary as a genre linked to workers’ struggles in which the documentarian attempts to insert himself as an active agent “to represent their working conditions in the cultural field”, he adds.
This ideological position opposes the debate of the 1980s in which it was claimed that photography lacked transparency, neutrality and truth. However, Ribalta claims to insert his work into this discussion. “In both cases, there is an ideological position regarding the debates and the emergencies of each moment, which are not the same. My point of view is that 80s criticism, like all criticism, is exhausted. Once the criticism is formulated, it becomes natural. In the 90s, Photoshop, digital technologies and this normalization of the discourse of photography as deception and lies appeared. And, in this context, it seems urgent to me to return to the documentary tradition; “affirm the power of photography to tell the truth and, above all, taking into account the fact that this truth is historically linked to political struggles,” reasons the artist.
His counter-discourse is positioned in his work against post-photographic theories. The supposed death of photography as a reactionary discourse which, according to Ribalta, should not be naturalized. “The part of truth must take precedence over the part of lies,” concludes the documentary maker.
