cefvigo gallery

Raniero Fernández was the person who most encouraged amateur photography during the 50s and the first half of the 60s. This activity was promoted by the photographic associations which were born at that time. The first of these associations, Agrupación Fotográfica Gallega (Vigo, 1946), developed its most intense activity when he became the chairman of the society, in 1954, organizing every year a "National Exhibition" that would become later an "Iberic Exhibition", a great number of social contests for its members and exhibitions such as the one of Otto Steinert. Another activity organized by the AFG was the "Celluloid Bank" or film library. He was also the chairman of the film society since it was founded in the 60s until 1977.

The period of the greatest activity of the AFG is also the period of Raniero's most important photographic activity. In the mid 60s the work of the association decreased, its bulletin disappeared and the contests were reduced. When in 1969 Raniero left his post in the AFG, the photographic activities of the association had almost completely disappeared.

Raniero's photographic work, as well as the work of the other amateur photographers, has a big formal concern which prevailed in the aesthetic conceptions of the associations at the time. They paid special attention to the composition of the images, regarding both the framing and the moment of shooting, and also the laboratory work. For him the work of the laboratory is something absolutely essential. The elegance of the compositions of his photographs was the result of a kind of withdrawal when taking the pictures, trying to go completely unnoticed, a fact that would allow him "to provide the photograph with a bigger sense of reality", something which reminds us of Cartier-Bresson's words "if you are noticed in the photograph, you must abandon it". Another common point with Cartier-Bresson is the geometry of his compositions, being those by Raniero much more static, and the people in them often considered just as elements of a formal composition.

Although landscapes were the favourite subject for the amateur photographers, these did not particularly attract Raniero, and elements such as light effects (stormy clouds, fog...) so characteristic of that time, were used by him in just a few pictures. Nevertheless, he made some nocturnes (Santiago, O Berbés) which he would send to contests, due to the importance given to that genre.

For Raniero "there has to be something live" in photography. This was the reason why he felt such an attraction for the fishing port in Vigo, defining O Berbés as "an exceptional photographic game preserve", a definition that shows not only the attraction that he felt for that place but, also, his conception of photography.

Most of Raniero's work, as well as Manuel García Ferrer's, are the liveliest works of those made by the people of the photographic associations, and their interest, from a documentary point of view, has grown with the passage of time. The photographs of O Berbés, and Ferrer's football pictures, were not to win the contests, they did not correspond to the idea of "artistic photography" of the time; actually they sent more bucolic and often full of light effect pictures to the contests. Those images can be cosidered, sometimes and to a certain extent, close to the so called humanistic photography, whose most representative work was The Family of Man. Raniero Fernández had seen this exhibition in one of his trips abroad, and the AFG organized a projection about it. In Raniero's work, particularly in his pictures of the fishing port of Vigo, there is a concern for the human being, but they never show conflicts or social criticism. Society appears as something peaceful, both from a social and a formal point of view, something absolutely according with his conservative view of the world.

During the 60s and at the beginning of the 70s he made a series of photographs about granaries and stone crosses, "the human and divine", quite different from the typical landscapes made by the other members of the association. No people or panoramic views would appear in them, on the contrary, they show a clear descriptive and cataloguing intention. The granaries, their diverse morphology, the different materials used, the transformations they underwent, and the confrontation between the various times they belonged to, are the only protagonists of the images. Bearing in mind this same intention, Raniero made several series about the religious goldsmithery (crosses, chalices, incense burners...) making use of a very conscientious technique.

As opposed to the historic claim of the pictorialist movement of considering photography as an art, Raniero defended, with a certain humility, the character of "artistic science", stating that "it does not require special qualifications just something that attracts your attention, and a sort of good taste for the setting". Indeed that "something" which attracted his attention, today allows some of us to remember, and some others to discover, new aspects of the past.