Vigovisións: the story of a project

In 1986, the Centre of Photographic Studies started up the project Vigovisions as a part of the Fotobienal of Vigo. The task of the first edition of the Fotobienal, held in 1984, was to establish a panorama of Galicia's photographic output as this had not been done before, and to draw attention to the fact that we had a photographic past worth recovering, studying and sharing.

In the presentation of that first edition we expressed our desire to give future Fotobienals an international dimension. However, in our view, being international meant not only acquainting Galicia with the work of modern innovators or with the classics; it meant producing and receiving, and this was the spirit in which Vigovisions was conceived. In sum, it signified a project that would allow us to actively participate in the aesthetic debates going on in contemporary photography. Our desire to produce, and not only receive work, along with the importance we attached to home-produced photography, historical and contemporary, was what made the Fotobienal of Vigo different from other photography festivals that flowered during the eighties.

With this as our purpose, we invited six photographers from different countries to work in Vigo, for a week, in June 1986. The works submitted -a minimum of ten prints per artist- would pass into the property of Vigo City Council, thus creating a photograph collection: the Photograph Collection of Vigo City Council.

The fact that at that time photography occupied only a marginal place inside the art world and, as a consequence, non-commercial photography had a very low economic value enabled us to develop it within the financial possibilities available to us. Photography's economic value did subsequently change, but it would not have been possible to continue the project if it hadn't been for the positive experience of earlier editions and the collaboration of the participating photographers.

The scope of the project was not limited only to works of a documentary nature. The idea was rather to use Vigo as the artists' work place and give them the freedom to interpret it as they wished, as regards both theme and form. In this respect, our project was different to commercial assignments.

Another important element was the cultural diversity of the participants, and their aesthetic plurality. This last consideration was not common in the cultural activities programmed in Spain. We also thought it essential that a Galician photographer should figure in the group to compare his or her work to what was going on in other countries. This was a condition we maintained throughout the entire eight editions of the project.

While it is true that at first the style of the photographs was predominantly documentary, although approached from very different angles (Sebastião Salgado and Cristina García Rodero, 1988), other more conceptual formulae in the work of Paul Graham (1988) and Allan Sekula (1992) also made an appearance.

In 1994, on the occasion of the Fotobienal's tenth anniversary, we decided to give greater protagonism to Vigovisions by increasing the number of participants to nine, which enabled us to diversify the languages and concepts as this was an essential feature of our concept of the project. Of special interest was the innovative approach to the documentary of Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, who incorporated fiction and stage sets into their work; the disposable stagings of Ron O'Donell, arranged only to be photographed; and the experiments of Joan Fontcuberta on the subject of industrial reconversion in which he contraposed negatives and photograms. All were very different to the usual concept of documentary photography.

In the following editions the proposals continued to diversify: the pinhole camara of Ruth Thorne-Thomsen; Pedro Meyer's digitally manipulated images, which was the first time this medium was seen in Vigovisions; Daniel Canogar; the appropriationist work of Joachim Schmid in which he used photographs found in the street, thereby questioning the notion of authorship; the works of Karen Knorr and Ana Teresa Ortega, who both drew from references to Galician history and literature.

Not all the works were confined to the aesthetic concept of bidimensional photography; Wojciech Prazmowski's three-dimensional photographic objects were particularly interesting, as were the installations of Luis González Palma and Paloma Navares, which made use of elements such as sand; Gerardo Suter, who used video as an important part of the work; and Belén Gómez, who reconstructed the space simulating a dark room as a replica of her own.

In our view, apart from displaying the works, an exhibition of this nature should provoke some thought on the development of the project itself and its repercussion. As the artists invited were very representative of contemporary photography, the exhibition offers a look at the evolution of photography during the years spanned by the project.

In order to understand how Vigovisions evolved, we have respected the chronology of the editions and grouped the works by artist. This strengthens the notion of authorship and contrasts the works of each edition. However, the sheer number of all them all -625- forced us to make a selection for this exhibition. The criterion we used was the photograph's significance inside the artist's oeuvre and our desire to ensure that the final selection did not distort the meaning of the work. We have tried to show the photographs as closely as possible to how they were shown when first exhibited.

The catalogue, however, does contain the entire collection of Vigovisions with small reproductions and technical details to help give a global view of the project as well as to make data available for any future study.

Many of the artists have contributed works from this project to subsequent exhibitions and publications. In some cases the works were conceived as part of a broader project they were working on or as a specific chapter in the artist's output, as was the case with Allan Sekula's Fish Story and other individual pieces like New Europe by Paul Graham and La España Oculta by Cristina García Rodero. Others, like Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, John Davies and the Galicians Vari Caramés, Xurxo Lobato and Xulio Correa included their photographs in subsequent exhibitions.

Though external to the actual project, this repercussion is not only a source of satisfaction but it has given Vigovisions a greater dimension. It is interesting to view the works beyond the project itself, as part of each artist's oeuvre, to see how he or she subsequently regards the piece made in Vigo. As a complement to the exhibition, we have provided a selection of the publications in which the pictures have been included.