Antoni Bernad: the portrait with a memory | Literature

First policeman of Ull, Antoni Bernardo. From 1960 to 2010 I could collect a collection of photographs from 50 years of the photographer’s profession. An anthology of two-century portrait and fashion images of one of the greats in the history of recent photography in our country. Thus, when we move from portrait to portrait, from Antoni Tàpies to Manolo Blahnik, from Salvador Dalí to Carolina Herrera, from Elsa Peretti to Oriol Bohigas, it is inevitable to realize that, in his work, work and life are indestructible.

This is a book of memories and images. With memory – always fragmentary, subjective, associative – the photographs are arranged in chronological order, with “a labyrinth of images that unfolds in a zigzag”, in Bernad’s words, or with an interconnected constellation of recordings, shapes and images of faces that form the cultural references that exist in us. circumscribed. The genesis of the book is presented in the retrospective exhibition that the Palau Robert will dedicate to the title in 2018 Antoni Bernardo. North/South/East/West. While the book did not contain the material selection of key images, it retained the kaleidoscopic narrative and complexity of fashion and portrait photography. Bernad has always treated the subject with respect to artists, intellectuals and models, in such a way that they coexist in the pages of the book without distances or hierarchies.

Born in Barcelona in 1944, Antoni Bernad began working for fifteen years as a graphic designer for advertising agencies. Ben Aviat, however, will decide to bet on his passion, photography. The couple’s first home, in a room that they will transform into a studio. Subsequently, in 1966, from Paris, he began to open his first professional careers. At the beginning of the 1960s, fashion photography began to take hold at home and Bernadette found the freedom she was looking for.

With Franco’s death, Catalan intellectuals will once again become protagonists. Bernad wanted to paint a sophisticated portrait, like the great figures of Anglo-American or Anglo-American culture. I wanted to ennoble them. It is here that Joan Miró, Lola Anglada, Josep Pla, Salvador Espriu or Mercè Rodoreda will interpret him. Portraits that accompany the book with anecdotes, testimonies and scenes from the fer-los moment. The story in which Rodoreda will have to cremate the photographic material is mythical because he believes that a couple of simple things should be portrayed, but in reality the images will please so much that they will serve the purpose of death.

Menys conegudes are three anecdotes that the little curator will share with Loulou de la Falaise, after the Parisian stylist and socialite, in a moment of euphoria, will take off her blouse and leave her holes in the air in a Jazz Colón in Franco’s Barcelona. With these small texts, Bernad advised us to take advantage of the camera of those who left us: most often that of a young photographer who obviously walked between the charm of his portraits and the respect they commanded. This entry into the photographic process also occurs thanks to the few contact tips that the book includes. A strip of contact lenses is the proof in which all the images of a mateix rodet are revealed in a small format, and which allows you to see the séncera – the doubts, the discarded gestures –, revealing them there as you think and look at the photographer. It is the most vulnerable and intimate part of a photographic archive. Page after page, retrace the life of Bernad escolant-se entre els seus negatius: like the series of portraits of the German seva Miu, a patient self-taught model, colored by the graphic designer Bernad.

“There’s a lot of repetition in this book. People come and go,” the photographer warned. I am certain: Tàpies, Blahnik, Bohigas. He portrayed so many people throughout his life that he could have made graphic biographies. So, if there is a constant presence in the life and work of Antoni Bernad, it is Antoni Llena: he continued as a double of lights, as a protagonist, as a companion who dialogues with the photographer, as an accomplice who helps him discover the inspiration of a portrait. Artist, friend and company inseparable, we also owe it to Fill that Bernad’s archive – plus a thousand negatives – did not end his career, with the materials he left behind. One day, after passing by the photographer, Llena defrauds the National Archives of Catalonia to give it up: she will thus save not only an archive, but the memory of a life and a country.