Vicente Nieto. Photographs 1936-1967

Pulse para ampliar Vicente Nieto Canedo

The Archives of the Crown of Aragon presents an exhibition produced by the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (Salamanca) in 2011 on the occasion of the donation of this author's photographic collection to the State. The exhibition consists of 110 images selected from the more than 5,000 preserved. Snapshots of a photographer who reflected Spanish society during the Civil War and the three decades after it from a ludic and traditional perspective.

Vicente Nieto Canedo (1913-2013), born in Ponferrada (León), moved to Madrid at the age of fifteen, training as a typographer and stenographer. He joined the General Union of Workers and Socialist Youth, photographing during the war the republican rear in the Sierra of Madrid. When the coup d'état occurred on July 18, 1936, he enlisted in the Mangada Column with his friend Paco Redondo, the eldest son of the Madrid mayor Cayetano Redondo, who died in combat with the rank of sergeant on November 13, 1936 at the Puente de los Franceses. He suffered prison after the war and it would not be until 1955 when he resumed his photography hobby, focusing on rural areas and its inhabitants, the protagonists of much of his work.

The action of light on objects, the out-of-focus, the presence of the off-field or the multiple directionality of spatial compositions are resources through which Vicente Nieto transcends the traditional character of human and landscape stereotypes.

The exhibition, whose curator is the Leonese photographer Amando Casado, is accompanied by a catalog available online and it is complemented by the documentary "La mirada furtiva" (The Furtive Look), a journey through the life and work of Vicente Nieto. Divided into four parts, it is accessible on YouTube