cefvigo gallery

Ramón Caamaño was born in Muxía in 1908. He established as a photographer in the 20s and worked in different villages all along the “Costa da morte”.

His photographs, as it is usual in the rest of country photographers’ work, is deeply austere: the ground of his portraits is sometimes just soil, sometimes it is covered by a torn rug, and the background varies during the twenty years that are shown in this book. In the beginning it used to be made with three pieces of cloth sewn together, and later that background was made of other pieces he bought in which the atmosphere of the inside as well as the outside of the rich country houses was reflected. During the 40s those backclothes were replaced by bedspreads which had the same function.

These portraits are the convergence of the will of the portayed, dressed in their Sunday best, and on the other side, the will of the photographer, who acted as the stage director, imposing his own criteria and controlling even the tiniest details. The central, static, frontal and hieratic position of the subjects, the lack of sophistication, their direct stare, are general characteristics of Caamaño’s portraits, something which contrasted with the more sophisticated aesthetics of the city studios.

This book is meant to be a study, from the point of view of contemporary sensitivity, of the portraits made by Ramón Caamaño between the late 20s and 40s. The pictures we have selected are those considered more interesting from the point of view of visual investigation, and not from a sociological, anthropological or historical perspective, however great their interest might be. These photographs suggest the idea of a reflection on the nature of portrait and its role, on the meaning of the photographic act in that context, and particularly, on the relationship established between the subject, the photographer and the camera.