Agustí Centelles und der Ausbruch des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs (Barcelona, 19. Juli 1936)
10.1515/9783110733921.Abstract
Agustí Centelles photographically captured the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona on July 19, 1936. This article reconstructs the photo-historical, iconographic, and media-archaeological contexts of this moment and demonstrates that the conciseness and auratic quality of Centelles’s images result from the entanglements between the city, the war, and the medium of photography. On a representational level, the effect of the photographs can be explained by the interplay of pre-iconographic, iconographic, and iconological pictorial levels. The particular eventfulness of the images themselves, however, lies in the interaction in which photography, acts of war, and urban structure enter as actors or places of indeterminacy in a mutual inscription that has both a symbolic (‘meaning’) and a material dimension (‘photographing,’ ‘destruction’) on all sides. As Ricard Martínez’s re-photography projects show, Centelles’s images continue to have an effect on the present.
