Luces en el negro

Luces en el negro is a different photographic journey from the Spain of the forties, fifties and early sixties, exploring the most attractive features for today's spectator of the society of the time and its physical environment.

Javier Aiguabella proposes a new approach to this stage that goes from the first postwar to the consolidation of development, revealing an unexpected and sometimes surprising country, far from the linear and somewhat rigid schemes maintained until now by conventional historiography. Here the most bearable and pleasing aspects of Spanish life of that time are focused, which in some way, balanced the balance of political isolation and intellectual and material narrowness in those certainly difficult years, in which together with rigor, intolerance and the prevailing poverty, there were also spaces of openness, of coexistence, of well-being and above all of an irreducible optimism in the future.

More than 120 images chosen from the great authors of the moment and from good fans or even from unknown absolutes, donated by collectors or kept in public and private archives throughout the country, testify in this work the capacity for resistance and the joy and vivacity of their own of the civil society of that time, which came out of a singularly brutal war and its long aftermath and precisely because of it felt more than ever overwhelming desire to enjoy the little or much that was within reach and regenerate while possible.

Illustrating leisure and entertainment in all its variants, festivals, fashion, cultural life, sports and landscapes, among other topics, this book provides a special component for the knowledge of our photography and the understanding of that period historical so little treated until now in its complexity of nuances and its aesthetic and visual richness.