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= History Of Spanish Photojournalism = (Summary text):

Before the Civil War
During the Spanish colonization of Morocco (1912–56), Spanish cultural discourses represented Morocco as a civilization with significant ties to Spain and explored the influences of Spain’s Islamic medieval past on Spanish culture and society. Because the colonial campaigns coincided with the development of photojournalism in Spain, the discourse of a Spanish-Moroccan fraternity was expressed in visual form in the press with a plethora of photographs, which evoked the “Moorish trace” in Spain. Photographs of women and urban spaces in Morocco and Spain became key subjects chosen to represent this trace in photojournalism in a number of widely-read photographic magazines between 1909 and 1933, including La Esfera, Mundo gráfico, Nuevo mundo, Estampa, and Ahora, and the colonial military publication Revista de tropas colonials. The article argues that photographs of urban spaces in Morocco and Spain served to evoke the memory of Islamic civilization, while images of women served to embody its ethnic and cultural legacy within Spain. It shows how colonial photography was used to recreate a medieval Muslim Iberian past that had long vanished, acting as a vehicle for the medievalist nostalgia that permeated Spanish culture during this period. Ultimately, the article reveals that Spanish colonial photojournalism orientalized not only North African culture but also Spain itself.

During the civil war
On July 17, 1936, several officers of the Spanish military initiated an uprising against their own Republican government in Spanish-held Morocco. Additional planned uprisings by other disaffected military officers were staged in major towns and cities throughout mainland Spain at the behest of General Mola in the following days. As the summer of 1936 wore on, General Francisco Franco took the reigns of the military coup and it became clear that Spain was embroiled in a civil war as the country fractured geographically and ideologically along Nationalist and Republican lines. The significance of the Spanish Civil War as major event in Spanish and European history is well-known. Beyond the implications of the civil war in terms of Spain's own history, the war is viewed, retrospectively, as a prelude to the larger ideological conflicts between fascism, communism, and democracy that eventually consumed all of Europe in World War II. The Spanish Civil War is also remembered as a testing ground for new techniques and technologies of both twentieth-century warfare - as immortalized in the bombing of Guernica - and twentieth-century media as represented by the rise of war photography and photojournalism.

Spanish Photojournalism in the Transition Era
During the fascist dictatorship (1939-75) in Spain, photojournalism was circumscribed by censorship, as were all other aspects of media and culture. In the early 1970s, however, in tandem with a growing opposition movement, pro-democracy journalists and periodicals sought to push the boundaries of censorship by giving voice and visibility to critics of the government. In this context, photography became a tool for denouncing and critiquing the regime. This article traces this shift by examining photographs of a pro-democracy demonstration held in Barcelona in February of 1976, three months after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Drawing on personal interviews with photojournalists and analysis of photographs and publication context, the author analyses photographic practices and the relationship between politics and aesthetics in photographs, and concludes that the examined photographs and practices during a period of censorship in Spain were effective tools for advocacy.

During the Spanish Civil War, a film, honoring the International Brigades in Spain in 1937, has been discovered in the New York office of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincolm Birgade, to show the continuous anti-Fascist struggle and honor their commitment. The film opens up with photographs from some of the more famous battles in which the International Brigrades took part. it demonstrates the commitment Spaniards had during that war, reminding people their struggle between democracy and fascism, and deliberatly asks the audience to bring help. All the photographs from the war are in like ‘’frozen moments’’ which are not specifically meaningful when simply looking at them, but they still represent and are symbolic to the nation. They were not especially reprensentations of five hundred Moorish cavalry charging across the Jamara valley toward the Republican trenches, neither were they representations of battles of American troops. They were there, however, to capture a panoramic view of American volunteers being deloused in March 1938. The photographs evoke not only their own moment but the days and months following it. They were representations of a long period of time, with repeated battles and deaths, all of which would be renamed ‘’the valley of death’’. They were acturally monumental in scale and meaning to the Spanish’s history. Any ordinary event in those two and a half years in Spain have been recorded, and connected to show people from image to image in a chain, are representations in an especially powerful series of explanations. For example, one of the pictures in the movie is a simple pair of shoes. They were traditional Spanish peasant sandals, serving to represent as figures for the people and their common aims, needs and capacities. Everytime an American volunteer would wear those sandals, he would stand in the people’s shoes and take on their identify ad their anti-Fascist duty. Hence, in a symbolic way, the decision to go to Spain and risk one’s lifee in the anti-Fascist way, is all embodied in the act of wearing a peasant’s sandal. In one of the photographs, an American volunteer lies dead in a pool of his own blood at Belchite. Above his dead-lying body, his alpargatas-clad comrades walk by. In the photograph, only their feet are visible, and they are a representation for their duty : the battle goes and they must go on. They are a figure for the thousands of sacrifices of internatinal volunteers made in Spain.

The most famous Spanish Civil War photograph is Robert Capa’s September 1936 portrait of a Republican militiaman at the point of death. The camera has caught a moment that would be way too fast for the human eye to capture. It therefore suggests that this picture was taken in a dangerous spot, where the battle was taking place extremely close to the photographer’s camera. It was first published in the French magazine Vu in 1936, and reprinted in Life magazine in 1937. It became an icon for the war and remains one of the most famous battlefield images in the history of photography. His willingness to risk his life to get such a close up has become legendary in the world of war photography. It is the point where the status of the war photographer changed during the Spanish Civil War, becoming linked to risk and proximity to death. A good war picture was then automatically linked to endangered body of the photographer.