Marta Sentís (Barcelona, 1949) assures that all artists are declassed. Something that does nothing but express the wandering spirit of this photographer owner of an agile and spontaneous look that gains strength with exile and in uncertainty finds its maximum expression. For more than two decades, photographing became the assertion of the author's own life experience; The search for a place in the world. An itinerary through different geographies and experiences that has been summarized in an exhibition, Todos los días son míos, which takes place at the Solterra Palace in Torroella de Montgrí, headquarters of the Vila Casas Foundation in Girona.
'New York, United States', 1986.Marta Sentís
'Yemen', 1984.Marta Sentís
'Salvador de Bahia, Brazil', 1989.Marta Sentís
'Yemen', 1984.Marta Sentís
'London. United Kingdom', 1985.Marta Sentís
'Salvador de Bahia. Brasil', 1991.Marta Sentís
'Yemen', 1984.Marta Sentís
'Amsterdam. Netherlands', 1985.Marta Sentís
'Kenia', 1986.Marta Sentís
Image of the room where the series 'Oficios' (1979) is shown. Marta Sentís
Image of the room where the series 'My generation. Barcelona, seventies and eighties'. Marta Sentís
Image of the room where the series 'Urban vision and collages' (1979) is shown. Marta Sentís
Image of the room where the series 'Encierro' (2020) is shown. Marta Sentís
The more than 200 images, many unpublished, are presented unrelated to their chronology and, for the most part, from their geography within the different rooms. "They have been grouped into small archipelagos that have similar emotional drives," says Alejandro Castellote, curator of the exhibition. That way, images taken in New York, Maldives and London can match in the same mosaic. Kassala (Sudan), Salvador de Bahia, Port of Spain, Cairo, Lamu (Kenya), Debre Zeyit and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) make up other scenarios that are defined by their vitality and in which the human figure is never absent. Through crowded compositions where, often, a game is established between the different visual planes, Sentís delves into the effervescence of everyday life willing to identify the moments that give off more intimacy, but also with the purpose of revealing what he still does not know. It is about "going on a trip without a written story in advance. Because traveling to confirm the stereotypes we have about a place or a culture foreign to ours is not worth it," writes the curator. "Perhaps therein lies the quintessence of his travels: not having a predetermined destination or, if you like, delaying it until the years announce the moment to start his return."
It was a personal crisis that led Sentís to seek his own voice through photography. After leaving his job in New York, he will return to Spain and shortly after embark on a trip to India where he will begin to take photos. Self-taught, he would start in the laboratory tasks with Manel Esclusa. "My learning was in black and white," recalls the author. "Back then we learned everything from each other, there were no schools. I was coming out of a rather grey Barcelona, and I was very struck by the burst of colour I found in other countries. The color seemed much more real to me. I remembered a trip I made with my father, the journalist Carles Sentis, and Francesc Català-Roca through Scandinavia, where the photographer kept repeating: 'Color is the future'. The color makes me vibrate. It relates me to life. The romanticism of black and white did not go with me, it took me to the past." "It should be noted that this powerful visual configuration in color —in terms of iconography— does not contain a temporal simultaneity with the formal modulations adopted by other photographers in those years," writes the curator in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition. "Sentís ventured down that aesthetic path alone. Something that says a lot about his intuition and his creative originality and about the visual maturity he exhibits in his gaze."
'Salvador de Bahia, Brazil', 1989.Marta Sentís
Under the title of Oficio, we will find in one of the rooms the images of a Barcelona that seems from the fifties. They are presented in a small size, in a format similar to that of trading cards and in black and white. However, the series was made in 1979. "The idea came from Fernando Amat, owner of Vinçon, Barcelona's famous design store," recalls the photographer. "Amat was a cultural agitator who gave a lot of room to young people. He brought together several of us, including Mariscal, América Sánchez, María Espeus, Peret and me in order to promote the Barcelona brand. He gave me to photograph those trades that I already sensed were from the past. Over time the series has gained strength, because you see what was left of other times."
On another wall, also in black and white, the author's traveling companions are gathered, protagonists of an artistic boil that began to flash in the Catalan capital at the end of the seventies and whom Sentís portrayed in spontaneous shots. "It was a less intellectualized underground than the one in New York," says the photographer, "and that carelessness, that madness of the street, that Andalusian grace, that indifference to the future, that going half-naked on the street, was shocking to me." Nazario, Enrique Vila-Matas, Bigas Luna, Jorge Rueda, Antoni Miralda, Miquel Barceló and Ocaña (the photographer participated as a still photographer in the film, Ocaña, intermittent portrait, by Ventura Pons) among many others make up the mosaic.
'Salvador de Bahia. Brasil', 1991.Marta Sentís
The innovative spirit of the author would also lead her to enter more experimental and playful formats of photography. Thus, he photographed with a macro lens fragments of postcards of the city, a slide that he would print in color photocopies that he would then paint on top before photographing again, subverting and sacralizing the classic black and white photographic copy. "No one ever considered them as photographs at that time," complains Sentís "nor did they ask me to be part of any Photographic Spring. Few of the things I did were considered photographs. Everything was very rigid in Spain." The truth is that "one of the reasons that orbited around this 'institutional' disaffection was her condition as a woman, added to the social class from which she came," says the commissioner. "Something that did not happen during those years with the male offspring of the bourgeoisie in Barcelona or Madrid."
In 1996, the photographer ended her career as a professional photographer and creator. I would be photographing again during the pandemic. "I spent the confinement alone, in a house in the countryside," says the photographer. "When I went for a walk I thought about how hard it must be to be locked in a flat, and it occurred to me to send every day, to a group of friends, the images that I took daily with my mobile phone and then manipulated." These have been gathered in a small monograph entitled Encierro (Joaquín Gallego Editor). "What unites this exhibition is that in my life I have done what I have seen fit without being accountable to anyone. I've been lucky enough to be able to lead a fairly free life," warns the photographer. "There is a verse by Pessoa that says: 'If after dying, you want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. It has only two dates: that of my birth and that of my death. Between one and the other every day is mine."
'Marta Sentis. Every day is mine.' Solterra Palace of Torroella de Montgrí. Girona. Through November 19, 2023.
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