The Photography Collection of the City Council of Vigo is an important archive that facilitates an analysis of some of the key moments in the history of photography. In this new look at the contents of the collection, PORTRAITS OF ANOTHER CENTURY offers a walk through the 20th century -now a century of the past- with a selection of portraits, one of the first genres with which early photographers experimented and one that evolved alongside the medium as it advanced over the years.

When Manuel Ferrol captured the departure of Spaniards immigrating to America in 1957, he chose a fragment that not only showed but also signified the political or social reality of which we are a part. In this commission offered by the Catholic Emigration Commission, the photographer's point of view becomes one with the "objective" record. In the photographs taken by Virxilio Vieitez in the same time period, we discover a Galicia steeped in subjectivity. The scenes captured in a completely natural setting, in lieu of the traditional studio set, are populated by persons - perhaps the same ones portrayed by Manuel Ferrol - who look directly at the camera, accompanied by references, iconographies and disguises that invite us to explore beyond the image.

In a brief essay, John Berger repeatedly used the phrase, "I have decided that it is worthwhile to record what I am seeing" to decode the role of the photographer faced with an event that he is about to freeze with his camera. This event, which is found not only in the image but also in the context and the moment when it was taken, refers to the absence and presence, to the visual and contextual content and to the photographer's interpretative role. The different perspectives shown in PORTRAITS OF ANOTHER CENTURY invite us to see photography as a mediator and witness of our historical, social and political reality.

Ricard Terré took these photographs in the same period as Ferrol and Vieitez. His compositions, his shots, his point of view defy traditional labels and are far removed from the socio-documentary nature of the other photographers' work. Their form is reminiscent of the reverse angle and wide angle shots of William Klein or the movement and blurriness of Giacomelli. They differ in form from the humour of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and his disciple Graciela Iturbide, who coaxes a smile from us with the pose of a cross-dressing man, and they also differ from the nationalism of Mexican Indian Flor Garduño and the defiant view in Antoine D'Agata's works. In this exhibition, the portrait acts as a representation and acknowledgement of our history, of our feelings or even of an instant in life that will forever pervade the gaze of a stranger who is suddenly a stranger no more.

The fraction of a second, which some photographers adopted as the foundation of their work, can be clearly seen in the portraits taken by Federico Fernández in 1979 of Venezuela as the destination of countless Galician emigrants and exiles, including the photographer himself, whose playful portraits with a festive air contrasted with his political struggles in that era. These faces are the opposite of those reflected in the photographs of Dorothea Lange -a "hungry and desperate" 32-year-old mother- Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee, witnesses of the economic depression that devastated the United States half a century earlier and gave rise to the project of "pictorial documentation of rural areas and rural problems" undertaken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

The events with which we opened our discourse take on a literal connotation when we analyse the Sandinista revolution through Claudia Gordillo's images, the photographs of the El Salvador of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Panateca Archive) or the images taken by Raúl Corrales, a reporter who has managed to capture unique moments of the Cuban revolution. These are evident examples of documentary photography that would encourage us to reopen the debate on the plastic nature of photojournalism. But that's another story.