When the great Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (born 1932) was a young man, he planned to make a book about his native Spain that would counter the propaganda imagery of the Franco regime. He set out for Andalusia and central Spain in the late 1950s, striving to create a portrait of the country. Since then, Saura has been fascinated not only by the process of photographing but by its technology, as demonstrated by his museum-quality collection of hundreds of historical and self-made cameras. Torn between the two media at the beginning of his career, he eventually chose to become a filmmaker but continued to take photographs.
Carlos Saura: España Años 50
offers comprehensive insight into Saura's photography with a focus on his black-and-white work of the 1950s—compelling images of landscapes, villages, bullfights and people of a bygone era.