Ortiz-Echagüe, José (1886-1980), Spanish photographer, and for many years, due to his success in international salons, better known abroad than any other. Not until today, however, has his work begun to be properly understood in Spain.
He took his first photographs aged 12; he later trained as a military engineer and served as an aerial photographer in Morocco. Images of North African landscapes and people founded his early reputation. Ortiz-Echagüe's mature work is a natural reference point for understanding the history of Spanish art photography, and although his aesthetic principles are dated, the quality of his images, and his lengthy dominance of the Spanish photographic scene, explain his classic status. Although his work (mainly using the Fresson or bromoil processes) was firmly rooted in pictorialism, and he was not averse to staging in the interests of visual impact, he defended the documentary value of his images, aspiring both to create art and to register what he perceived to be the national ‘reality’ of his time. The critic Antonio Ollé Pinel said of him in 1944 that he was ‘in love with his country, [and] became the singer (through photographic images) of the beauty of its places and of the character of its people, managing with all his work … to show the world the richness and variety of aspects that the country can offer to the sensitive observation of an artist’. His best-known images aimed to capture the variety and richness, the regional dress and mystic character of ‘eternal Spain’, a project realized in three widely distributed books published in the period straddling the Civil War (1936-9): España: tipos y trajes (Spain: People and Costumes; 1933), España: pueblos y paisajes (Spain: Villages and Landscapes; 1938), and España mística (Mystic Spain; 1943).
As with many post-Civil War Spanish artists, ideological concerns permeated his work. However, although his images of Spain are often viewed as propagandistic, they are in reality more complex, a blend of patriotic hymn and anthropological record. Ortiz-Echagüe gave up photography in 1973.
— Gerardo F. Kurtz
Bibliography
- Martínez de Morentin, D., Asunción. La fotografía de José Ortiz-Echagüe: técnica, estética y temática (2000)
