Leaflet (pdf - 773 Kb) [1]Leaflet (pdf - 773 Kb)
Mey Rahola was one of the few photographers to receive recognition in Catalan photographic circles during the Second Spanish Republic. In an environment that was still rigidly patriarchal, among her generation of women she was someone who resolutely entered spaces that, until then, had been reserved for men. A lover of both photography and sailing, Rahola identified with the emancipatory ideal of the “modern woman” and challenged traditional gender roles. Open to everything, entrepreneurial and ironic when she had to be, she practised a modern type of photography, and it was with this that she played her part in renewing ways of looking at a rapidly transforming world.
This exhibition is the result of her archives being rescued and the recovery of the story of a photographer who saw how the Spanish Civil War and her subsequent exile in France cut short a career that had only just begun. Despite the fact that her name and her work were consigned to oblivion for more than eighty years, Rahola wished to bequeath her work, duly organised and signed, as an artist. Now, for the first time, it is being presented in a retrospective exhibition.
The daughter of parents from Empordà, Remei “Mey” Rahola de Falgàs was born in León and grew up in Madrid, although she spent her summers in Cadaqués. In 1921 she married the Republican lawyer and politician Josep Xirau Palau, with whom she lived in Seville and Rome before settling in Barcelona, where, in around 1932, she began taking photographs. Soon after, she took her photography to a level beyond just being a domestic hobby. Her work was recognised with awards, and shown in exhibitions and publications, in particular by the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya, a benchmark institution at the time.
With a vitalist and expressive perspective, she was part of a group of Catalan photographers who embraced certain visual resources from the photographic avant-garde, such as diagonal compositions, off-centre motifs, high-angle and low-angle perspectives, and the search for new shapes and geometries through the camera
The military coup of 1936 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War disrupted what had been a promising start to her career. Rahola occasionally collaborated with Republican propaganda, while taking photographs that highlighted the contradictions of the war, such as La cua del pa (The queue for bread). The Francoist victory forced her family into exile in Lyon, France, where her previous experience allowed her to become a professional photographer and therefore support her family during the difficult years of World War II.
When peace came in 1945, Rahola abandoned her professional life and moved to Vaucresson, near Paris, from where she travelled regularly and led a very independent life. The freedom of an amateur, added to the experience of a professional, gave her photographs from those years a great stylistic versatility, covering humanist photography, fashion photography and a certain geometric formalism. She continued taking photographs until her death on August 17, 1959.
The adverse circumstances of history and her status as a woman, mother and wife condemned Mey Rahola to a long and undeserved silence, despite her continued passion for photography and her obvious ability to adopt and renew the visual languages of her time.