Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 25th November 2022–11th September 2023 Museu de l’Empordà, Figueres, 26th November 2022–9th April 2023

Although Mey Rahola (1897–1959) was one of the first women to become renowned for art photography in Spain, she remains a little-known figure today. Two linked exhibitions with a single catalogue dedicated to the Catalan photographer set out to rectify this and liberate an overlooked artist from the shadow of anonymity. Working with Rahola’s family, the curators, Lluís Bertran Xirau, Roser Martínez Garcia and Roser Cambray, have assembled 550 items from her collection, including 250 negatives and a number of photograph albums. That this material had been handed down and divided between the artist’s friends and family is testimony to her interest in her posterity. The fact that, nonetheless, Rahola has remained largely unknown, one is reminded in the exhibition catalogue, is a result partly of her status as a female photographer operating in the early twentieth century and partly of the events of the Spanish Civil War, which ruptured her burgeoning career.[1] The exhibition at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya presents Rahola’s varied and restless life and examines the events that influenced, and are captured in, her work. It is supplemented by a smaller exhibition at the Museu de l’Empordà, which focuses on two prominent themes in Rahola’s photographs: nautical pursuits and sport. 

Rahola was born in León and grew up holidaying in the vibrant seaside town of Cadaqués, which was also frequented by such artists as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Marcel Duchamp. Early evidence of her interest in photography dates from the beginning of the 1930s, when her brother-in-law, Joan Xirau Palau, a childhood friend of Dalí’s, taught Rahola to develop photographs in the storeroom of a pharmacy he owned in Figueres. This inspired her to purchase her first camera, a Rolleiflex. Also skilled at yachting – a sport then largely reserved for men – Rahola began to take photographs of nautical activities and marine life. By 1935 she had shown her work publicly on at least three occasions, including the III Saló Internacional d’Art Fotográfico, where she was the only exhibiting Spanish woman artist.[2] However, her success was cut short when she was forced into exile in 1939 as a result of her Republican loyalties. With her husband, she crossed the border and travelled across France, often living apart from her children. In June 1940, when the German invasion of France began, they headed for Lyon, where they lived until the end of the Second World War. 

The retrospective at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya is organised across three rooms, each of which showcases works from a specific period – 1931–36, 1937–45 and 1946–59 – and traces the development of Rahola’s photography alongside concurrent social and political events. One of the most striking photographs on display is La cua del pa (Queue for bread; Fig.16), which is one of only two surviving images that Rahola took during the civil war period. She documented the scene from the window of her flat in Gran Via, Barcelona, looking down to the street below, where a neat line of figures queue up to receive their daily ration of bread.[3] The image adopts a humanist, photojournalistic approach that was still novel, especially for a woman. The people in the image are too far away for viewers to distinguish any individual features or significant differences in clothing, creating a scene of unity and group camaraderie. The image can be read as a statement of defiance in the face of Francoist forces that were seeking to impose authoritarianism and defeat the Catalonian spirit of kinship and independence. The photograph is a key example of Rahola’s role as a witness and documenter of the danger, deprivation and political turbulence endured during this period. 

By contrast, Jugadores de pilota (Ball players; Fig.18) reverberates with unbridled joy. In a composition of upturned faces, outstretched arms and, at the picture’s apex, a large beach ball, the most visible figure is Rahola’s daughter, Maria Teresa. In her book Vision and Difference (1988), Griselda Pollock relates the compression of pictorial space in Mary Cassatt’s paintings of female sitters to ‘the social confinement of women’, identifying the threat of their protrusion into the viewer’s space as ‘a statement of resistance’.[4] Rahola’s close-up shot in Jugadores de pilota similarly features a shallow depth of field. Here, however, it is inviting rather than stifling, allowing the viewer intimate access to the exuberance of the scene; the work signifies a lack of inhibition, from the players’ bare skin to the sunlight that contours their arms and shoulders. Rahola’s focus was on the humble and the understated, the tacit beauty of the quotidian and shared moments of companionship and play. The shapes that intersect her photographic planes, the high and low geometric angles and off-centre compositions, are unusual and inventive. Her visual articulations of unrestrained, public female agency stand in stark contrast to the oppressive and imminent threat of the Francoist dictatorship. Jugadores de pilota is a vibrant defiance of societal expectations and a resolute assertion of the emergent feminist ideal of the New Woman. 

In 1954, five years before Rahola’s death, Albert Camus published his lyrical ode to ocean voyaging, The Sea Close By. Camus’s opening sentences encapsulate a fascination with the sea that Rahola evidently shared: ‘I grew up in the sea and poverty was sumptuous, then I lost the sea and found all luxuries grey [. . .] since then I have been waiting. I wait for the homebound ships, the house of the waters’.[5] In Rahola’s work, the sea is even closer than ‘close by’; it shimmers and crashes in black-and-white photographs, expressing in multiplicity and abundance the triumph and chaos of the era. In Cops de mar amb mal temps (Sea strikes in bad weather; Fig.17) a boat rocks dramatically on the water as a colossal wave swells in the distance. Although this photograph shares an unmitigated, wild energy with Jugadores de pilota, it connotes hard labour and potential crisis rather than leisure. Rahola’s daring engagement with the ocean can arguably be paralleled with her role as a photographer. Her seafaring images demonstrate that she was no passive witness, but instead an active participant in a world defined by risk, speed and liberation. 

Rahola’s photographs are inextricably infused with a reverence for movement and adventure. In their curatorial endeavours to evoke the artist’s life and achievements for a twenty-first century audience, both the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and the Museu de l’Empordà establish Rahola as a symbol of modernity and sociocultural transgression. Indeed, the level of detail in the exhibition catalogue helps to construct a layered biography. Curatorial explorations of both her personal and political experiences make an engaging narrative, providing nuance and context to understanding her photographs. Essays by María de los Santos García Felguera, Lourdes Delgado and Núria F. Rius present critical readings that inscribe Rahola’s work within practices of femininity and itinerance. The first substantial, composite document of her life and legacy, the catalogue effectively introduces new audiences to a multidimensional artist. 

Throughout both exhibitions, the sea resonates as a site of mobility and emancipation. In Sense títol [Mercè Fina i Albert Xirau a l’Alai] (Untitled [Mercè Fina and Albert Xirau on the Alai]; 1934; Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona), which is shown at the Museu L’Emporda, Rahola captured her son, Albert, sitting aboard a sailboat, looking out at a large cruiser. His casual, confident pose at the prow of the boat beckons the viewer towards the horizon. Similarly, the final photograph in the Museu Nacional’s exhibition, Setembre (September; 1946; Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona) shows foam washing up on a beach. Beyond the cropped picture plane, the tide stretches out into the distance. It is a subtle, somewhat wistful note to end on; it is an open-ended conclusion. Rahola’s is a modern, feminist vision that continues sailing forwards, on course, at last, for eminence. 

[1] Catalogue: Mey Rahola: Fotògrafia 1897–1959. By Lluís Bertran Xirau, Roser Cambray and Roser Martínez Garcia. 224 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona and Museu de l’Empordà, Figueres, 2022), €35. ISBN 978–84–8043–392–1. 

[2] See L. Bertran Xirau and R. Martínez Garcia: ‘Mey Rahola, una mirada retrobada’, Revista de Girona 320 (May–June 2020), pp.56–59, at p.57. 

[3] See L. Bertran Xirau and R. Martínez Garcia: ‘Mey Rahola: photographer’, in op. cit. (note 1), p.198. 

[4] G. Pollock: Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and Histories of Art, Abingdon 1988, p.89–90; see also G. Pollock: Mary Cassatt, London 1980. 

[5] A. Camus: The Sea Close By, London 2013, p.1.