“You will never forget the pictures you see, even if you didn’t take them.”

PalmaTheir passion for the profession is expressed in every thought, every doubt they exchange about photography, in capital letters. Jean-Marie del Moral (Montoire, 1952, settled in Mallorca) and Pilar Aymerich (Barcelona, ​​1943) have photographed revolutions and historical figures and have become totems of an art that has suffered in recent decades from the devastating transformation of digitalization. They talk about it in a dialogue so fluid and spontaneous that the prepared questions quickly lose their usefulness.

How was your experience in the field of digitalization?

– The PA is very bad. I am from the analog generation. Making the image, exposing it, making it positive, going to communicate it, is a ritual that makes you more of an author. Now it’s like putti putti, you take a picture and you can hardly look at it. It’s another stage, and maybe we shouldn’t call it “photography”, but “photography”. The things that are important to me, I do in analog.

– JM It’s interesting how we name things. We went from calling it “photography” to calling it “photography” and “image”, and today we call it “”Personal Photos‘…a physical work, in a hard copy in a certain format, that you can look at and enter into in a poetic way. When you show physical copies to someone, they feel aroused in a way that is not related to showing them on a screen. It’s not the same emotion, the same poetic.

Is the sector unified?

— PA It’s a very individual job and we go for free, that’s why we get “provoked” a lot. They don’t respect authorship, the photos come out unsigned, cropped; it’s a real disaster in this country.

– JM When you start taking pictures, there is so much focus and energy that you are not the same person. It is a very solitary and personal work. Photography is the only medium that stops time. It is magical.

Does environment affect appearance?

– PA Photography speaks without you realizing it. The scene affects him a lot. For example, a woman’s body moves differently than a man’s body, it’s not the same.

– JM Everything is nourished by sight. Paul Valéry said, “I would like to talk about what everyone sees before their eyes, but no one sees.”

– PA Jean-Luc Gordard used to say that framing is an ethical issue, because you frame what you want to explain. Culture is more important than technique. If you know how to operate a washing machine, you know how to operate a camera, but if you don’t know how to look, you don’t know how to take pictures.

Is culture more important than technology?

– JM culture is fundamental. We are photographers because I love painting, literature, and cinema. One author leads you to another; it’s all chains.

– B.A. I can’t paint a picture of a writer if I don’t read him, because it’s like taking an X-ray. You have to capture him and the whole environment. You work with human beings. I always felt guilty about the moment of pain I caused when I photographed three former deportees in Mauthausen. Montserrat Roig interviewed them, and they were sitting at a table explaining terrible things. I saw that there was no picture and left. Then I saw a wall in an empty area, so I went back and asked them to go out into the street. I asked them to line up, as they used to do in a stadium. Their faces changed automatically, and the pain came out. I only removed three negatives, because I saw that I was hurting them. But I had to make them tell a story.

—JM Shyness, for a photographer, is a wonderful quality. It gives you the right distance. You see yourself being annoying and hurt, suffering with the other, and that moment can be translated into a great photograph, in an almost unexpected way. When you are photographing, the fracture of time is beyond your control.

Missing photos?

— JM I’ve lost thousands of photos. Life is moments. It happens just like in conversation. Sometimes you say, “Oyster, I forgot to tell him that.”

— PA You will never forget the pictures you see, even if you didn’t take them.

— JM When I was eight, I went to Catalonia for the first time with my grandmother, to the Granja d’Escarp. There I discovered these women in black with a jug, who looked like the actress Irene Papas, and the miners coming out of the mine. They were carrying a huge lump of coal behind their bikes. These images have stuck in my mind forever. Perhaps the love of the untaken image is recorded here and helps me when I compose such an elegant composition. Of a boy who came from Paris [fill de pares republicans de Catalunya i Andalusia exiliats] It was weird.

– The Palestinian Authority was in La Model Prison. The prisoners were rioting on the roof. Outside there were family members and grandparents hugging each other and crying. I went to take their picture and the lady looked at me with a face that made me put the camera down. There are times when you decide not to take a picture.

They recommend

Captured moments that made them special