Semana Santa, Barcelona (Holy Week, Barcelona)

In March 1959, Terré, Miserachs and Masats’ second exhibition opened in Aixelá, a photography equipment shop in Barcelona. The presentation was very original: huge blow-ups arranged on metal panels, without frames or glass, at varying heights. Ricard Terré presented a collection of pictures of cemeteries and processions that avoided cliché by dint of their intensity, and which clearly show not only the quality of his personal irony-steeped vision, but also the expressiveness of the images, in stark black and white. The cemetery photographs seem to comment on other photographs, as sad, dead and empty as the burial recesses in the cemetery walls. A woman stares at them in what is a devastating image for people who enjoy visiting exhibitions. Terré emphasises the eyes of the penitents carrying candles and crosses, accompanied in one of the most overwhelming images by a touching, lost blind man: a way of referencing the darkness of a sinister era by a photographer who knew how to distance himself from his subject.

Horacio Fernández