Antoni Campañà
BIO
The double gaze of Antoni Campañà
Antoni Campañà (Arbúcies 1905- Sant Cugat del Vallés 1989) was born at the same time as photojournalism, a field in which he made his career as a sports reporter and pioneer of the tourist postcard. Before turning thirty, Campañà had achieved wide national and international recognition for his refined mastery of bromoleum technique. In the years before the Spanish Civil War, he received numerous awards and consolidated his position as an artist. He was a member of Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya and in 1933 he traveled to Munich to train with photographer Willy Zielke. He carried out an important work of experimentation and innovation, thus transcending the pictorialist parameters and becoming an unparalleled benchmark of experimental photography in Spain. From those early 30s, we still have compositions like Tracció de sang (1933), framed within the traditional portrait of farming and tradition.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Campañà’s political commitment made its way through his gaze and led him to compose an extensive photographic documentation of the war. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Campañà’s visual testimony remained hidden for decades. Thirty years after his death, his family found the images stored in red boxes, which come to light in La Caja Roja (2019), an investigation of Plàcid Garcia-Planas, the historian Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta and the photographer David Ramos, edited in Catalan and Spanish by Comanegra and by Éditions du Seuil in French.
In 2021 the MNAC (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya) dedicated a major retrospective of his work, The Endless War. Antoni Campañà.
Selected exhibitions
2022 Icons of What? Women and the Civil War in the Gaze of Antoni Campañà, XXI Xavier Miserachs Biennial of Photography, Palafrugell
2021 The Day after the Retreat: Portbou, 1939, MUME, La junquera, Girona.
2021 The Endless War, MNAC, Barcelona.
2020 La Barceloneta at war, ICUB, Barcelona.
Press:
– – “¡Es la tía Anita!”: el enigma despejado tras la icónica foto de la miliciana anarquista durante la Guerra Civil. Marta Borraz, El Diario, 07.08.2023
– La Guerra Civil y una revisión crítica de Gaudí, ejes del MNAC para 2021.ElPaís. José Ángel Montañés. 11.02.2021
– La Guerra Civil invadirá el MNAC con permiso de Gaudí.elPeriódico. Anna Abella. 11.02.2021
– Las fotografías inéditas de la Guerra Civil de Campañà tendrán edición francesa.La Vanguardia. Magí Camps. 17.06.2020
– ‘La caja roja’. Fotos inéditas de Campañà en la Barcelona de la Guerra Civil. El ojo crítico. RTVE. 27.04.2021
– Aparecen 5.000 fotos inéditas de la Guerra Civil de Antoni Campañà en un parking.Público. José Oliva. 11.11.2019
Contact gallery to acquire work ↓
Presentem “La capsa vermella. La guerra civil fotografiada per Antoni Campañà”
TV3
Xavier Graset conversa sobre el llibre amb el periodista Toni Monné i l’historiador Arnau González Vilalta.