THE ENCAPSULATED WORLD OF DARÍO VILLALBA

Every so often I go back to the work of an artist who has almost nothing to do with weddings, and every time I come back from it I photograph people slightly differently. His name is Darío Villalba, he was born in San Sebastián in 1939, and he spent his whole career doing something that on paper sounds impossible: painting with photographs.

 

I want to write about him here because I think there is something in what he does that anyone who photographs human beings ought to sit with for a while, and because the more I shoot, the more I suspect that the difference between a nice picture and a picture that stays with you has very little to do with the camera.

 

THE SKATER WHO BECAME A PAINTER

 

The first thing you learn about Villalba is a detail so unlikely that it sounds invented. Before he was an artist he was an athlete. He represented Spain in figure skating at the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo. He was seventeen years old.

 

At eighteen he had his first exhibition, at the Alfil gallery in Madrid, and he enrolled at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. In 1962 he was given a scholarship to study at Harvard. So the biography reads: Olympic ice, Madrid, Harvard, and then a lifetime of work that almost nobody outside the art world in Spain can name, even though it hangs in the Reina Sofía.

 

I find that combination fascinating. Figure skating is a discipline about the body under total control, performed once, in front of judges, with no second take. It is difficult not to see that somewhere in the work he made later.

 

THE ENCAPSULATED

 

In 1966 he began the series that made him. He called them Los Encapsulados, the encapsulated ones, and the idea is disarmingly simple to describe and very hard to shake off once you have seen one.

 

He took photographs of human beings, usually anonymous ones, often people at the edge of things, enlarged them to a scale where they stop being pictures and start being presences, worked into them by hand with emulsion and paint until the line between photograph and painting stopped being a useful question, and then sealed the result inside a capsule of methacrylate.

 

A person, behind glass, at human size, looking at you.

 

In 1970 he showed them at the Venice Biennale and the international art world finally caught up with him. Three years later he took the international painting prize at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1983 he was given Spain’s National Prize for Plastic Arts, and in 2002 he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

 

WHY A WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER SHOULD CARE

 

I am aware of how far this is from what I do for a living. Nobody has ever asked me to seal them in methacrylate, and I would like to keep it that way. But there are three things in Villalba’s work that I think about constantly when I am standing in front of somebody with a camera.

 

The first is that he treats the photograph as an object, not as an image. We have gone very far in the opposite direction. A photograph today is a file, and a file is weightless, endlessly copied, seen for a second and a half on a screen the size of a hand. Villalba took the opposite view: he made the photograph physical, he made it big, he made it heavy, he put it behind a surface you could touch. And the effect of that is not nostalgia. The effect is that you cannot scroll past it. It occupies space in the room and therefore it occupies space in you. Whenever a couple asks me whether the album is really worth it, this is the argument I am secretly making.

 

The second is his subjects. He did not photograph the beautiful and the famous. He photographed people that the rest of the world had agreed to stop looking at, and then he made it physically impossible to look away. There is enormous tenderness in that, and no sentimentality at all, which is a very difficult balance to hold. A wedding is the exact opposite situation, everybody is being looked at on purpose, but the underlying discipline is the same: the job is to see the person and not the occasion.

 

The third is that he refused to choose. His generation in Spain inherited abstraction, and he stood closer to pop and to conceptual art, and he used a camera in a country where using a camera was still not quite considered making art. He was, in the most literal sense, a painter who worked photographically and a photographer who worked with paint, and he simply declined to answer which one he was. There is a permission in that which I try to remember on the days when the work I want to make and the work I have been hired to make do not point in the same direction.

 

THE CAPSULE

 

What I keep returning to is the capsule itself, because I do not think it means what people assume it means.

 

The easy reading is that it is a cage. Isolation, alienation, the modern condition, all the words that get written on gallery walls. And that reading is available, obviously.

 

But the other reading is that a capsule is what you put around something you are trying to keep. We encapsulate the things that matter and are fragile. And if you take it that way, then those enormous sealed portraits of anonymous people are not a statement about loneliness at all. They are an act of protection, made at the scale of a monument, for people nobody thought were worth protecting.

 

That is very close to what I think I am actually doing on a wedding day. Not documenting an event. Putting a capsule around a few hours that will otherwise dissolve completely, and doing it carefully enough that in forty years it still holds.

 

If you ever get the chance to stand in front of one of his pieces, take it. Photographs of photographs are useless here, which is rather the point he was making all along.