How Emili Godes looked

Emili Godes was born in 1895, in the final decade of the nineteenth century, on the threshold of all the technical, aesthetic and ideological changes that would transform photography. He belonged to exactly the same generation as those who drove those changes in Europe and America: Paul Strand and Man Ray (1890), El Lissitzky (1890), John Heartfield and Alexander Rodchenko (1891), Christian Schad and André Kertész (1894), László Moholy-Nagy (1895), Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1896), Walter Peterhans, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Edward Weston (1897), Berenice Abbott (1898) and Brassaï (1899).

In Barcelona he coincided with an equivalent generation: Pere Català Pic (1889), Ramon de Baños (1890), Gabriel Casas and Josep Masana (1892), Josep Sala (1896), Joan Porqueras (1899), Antoni Arissa (1900), Joaquim Gomis (1902) and Josep Maria Lladó (1903). Of these, Arissa, Català Pic, Lladó, Masana, Porqueras and Godes himself followed a similar path: the transition from Pictorialism to New Vision.

Rather than labels and rigid categories, the twentieth century is better understood in terms of tendencies, transversal languages and techniques, personal phases and evolution. Godes did not belong to a closed group or sign manifestos: he was a professional receptive to his surroundings who evolved in parallel with his contemporaries.

Godes spent eighteen years as an employee in two of Barcelona’s leading photographic establishments: first Casa Riba and then Casa Cuyàs, where he became head of the laboratory. He did not become independent until 1928. Far from distancing him from modernity, those years of professional practice were his route into it.

The Butlletí de l’Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya —of which he was a founding member— drew its articles directly from specialist foreign publications (Photo-Revue, La Photographie, Photo-Era), giving him rigorous training in the most modern techniques and equipment of the period. This was complemented by Revista Kodak and Revista Agfa, publications born from the photographic industry that promoted industrial and advertising photography and moved away from Pictorialist principles.

He also worked for avant-garde painters and sculptors, and for art galleries: reproducing their works allowed him to encounter the artistic trends of his time at first hand. He sat on competition juries alongside Narcís Ricart, Antoni Arissa and Català Pic. This combination —technical training, contact with artists and recognition among peers— enabled him to make the leap and create his series of macro photographs.

New Vision emerged from Bauhaus ideas. It promoted new framings and viewpoints —high and low angles, fragmentation, close details, and forms of decontextualisation sometimes close to abstraction— as well as contrasts of form and light. Its aim was to reflect reality as we perceive it visually, not as pictorial tradition arranges it.

All these devices appear in Emili Godes’s work: displaced viewpoints, fragmentary framings, diagonals and close attention to the visual structure of objects and spaces. Godes did not belong to a closed group, but his work clearly documents his transition from Pictorialism towards the modern visual languages of his time.

Photographers of New Objectivity sought sharp focus and unmanipulated photographs, aiming for a unity between photographic technique and the object photographed: flat light, small apertures, long exposure times and the photographer’s eye. Godes’s technical precision was not incompatible with artistic expression. In his scientific, industrial and art-reproduction photography, detail, sharpness and control of lighting also create a visual experience.

This is the movement with which he has most often been associated: as early as 1986 Marisol Farré devoted a degree thesis to him entitled Un fotógrafo catalán de la Nueva Objetividad, and in 1996 the exhibition and catalogue of the Departament de Cultura presented him as Emili Godes. Fotògraf de la Nova Objectivitat.

Camera-less photography was the avant-garde’s most radical experiment: writing directly with light, without lens or negative. Christian Schad, Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy practised it from the late 1910s and especially during the 1920s. Godes came to it around 1930.

In his photograms, attention shifts from recognisable representation towards silhouette, transparency, texture and abstraction. The MNAC holds six, deposited by his daughter Maria Rosa Godes in 1997 and donated in 2005: mostly plant motifs, but also everyday objects such as scissors.

The camera made it possible to move close enough to an object to decontextualise and fragment it, turning it into pure form. A pair of spectacles, hands or a piece of fabric cease to be useful things and become visual matter. In these images, photography as artistic expression and photography as a practical tool can sometimes be distinguished only by the context in which they are published.

Photomontage allowed Godes to construct images by combining and reorganising different elements. The process expanded photography’s documentary capacity and turned it into a tool for visual synthesis, particularly suited to industrial, advertising and propaganda communication.

His photomontages occupy the same territory as those of Pere Català Pic —the leading theorist of the new photography in Catalonia— and Gabriel Casas, who brought the technique into institutional graphic language during the Spanish Civil War.

Double exposure was used significantly by the Surrealists, although it also became widespread in other contexts. In Godes’s work it appears as a means of superimposing and displacing reality, and it takes on a narrative function in Màgica Nit (1945), where it helps represent the realm of childhood dreams and fears.

In his images of insects, plants and other natural forms, Godes turns scientific enlargement into a visual experience. His aim is not only to show: he also seeks to produce surprise, estrangement and beauty. He explained it himself in 1955: ‘At lower magnifications, and already outside the strict field of science, it offers us an immense panorama of unusual artistic interest, where curiosity finds a source of inexhaustible surprises. Until now, my specialisation has been directed solely towards this latter aspect.’

He mastered these techniques through his work with the Escola Superior d’Agricultura, with which he began collaborating in 1927. Professor Francisco García del Cid described him a few months later as an ‘indefatigable worker who has known how to devote Sunday mornings to me, learning the basic problems of photomicrography in just a few weeks’. The photomicrography apparatus he used had been specially built by Casa Cuyàs, precisely during the years when Godes worked there. The long-repeated idea that he worked with rudimentary methods and makeshift lenses made from glasses and bottles therefore needs qualification: he started from sound technical knowledge and appropriate equipment.

The series took time to become public. Sebastià Gasch devoted an article to it in Meridià in 1938 with five photographs, and it was he who exhibited it in 1944 at the El Jardín gallery in a solo exhibition. This was followed by three articles by Carles Sindreu: El Español (1955, nine photographs), Diario de Barcelona (1956, ‘Monstruos insospechados’, three) and the magazine San Jorge (1963, ‘Monstruos en primavera’, nine).

Terminological precision: close-up photography covers reproduction ratios between 1:5 and 1:1, photomacrography begins at 1:1, and photomicrography is used when a microscope is required. Much of what he called ‘microphotographs’ are technically photomacrographs.

For Godes, framing was never a neutral decision. The point from which something is photographed transforms its scale, tension and meaning. His high angles, low angles, close-ups and diagonals show a desire to construct the image, not merely record what stood before him.

Godes’s modernity is also built from basic elements: light, lines, surfaces, volumes and rhythm. In his photographs these elements organise the image and can turn a functional object, a plant or an industrial installation into an autonomous composition.

Against the bucolic ideal of idyllic landscapes, the modern photographer seeks human activity. The city becomes a subject: the urban fabric, people as a group, concrete and glass buildings. And the urban night becomes a new stage, with streets lit by public lighting that more sensitive cameras and film finally make possible to capture. Brassaï published Paris de nuit in 1933.

Godes photographed the Banco Comercial Transatlántico shop window at night during the Exposición de la Luz of 1929: an illuminated sign, reflections on wet pavement and a streetlamp. It was an advertising commission —the lighting installation used OSRAM lamps— resolved with the same visual vocabulary that his contemporaries used for personal artistic work.

Advertising photography demanded clarity, precision and the ability to turn a product into an appealing image. Barcelona experienced a notable surge in this field during those years: in 1932 the Institut Psicotècnic de la Generalitat was created, with an Advertising Seminar closely linked to Català Pic, and the I Salón Nacional de Fotografía Publicitaria was held at the Publi-Cinema premises on Passeig de Gràcia, opening with the lecture La fotografía moderna como elemento de publicidad. Godes took part with his photographs, which were singled out by the press.

While specialist magazines remained faithful to Pictorialist salon photography, advertising —a commercial commission— opened the door to modern photography. Godes applied rigorous framing, contrasts, geometry and particular attention to lighting. In an advertisement for Laboratorios Andrómaco, around 1936, the young girl is Maria Rosa, his youngest daughter.

In the post-war years it was in film that Godes developed his artistic creativity. He had worked in stills photography since the early 1930s, particularly for the Orphea studios, so he knew the medium thoroughly. Multidisciplinarity was also characteristic of artists of his generation: Catalans such as Ramon de Baños, Josep Masana and Josep Maria Lladó ventured into film, as did Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko and Leni Riefenstahl.

He directed three short films, all silent. Màgica Nit (1945), just over eight minutes long, mixes the excitement of Epiphany-night presents with childhood fears and uses double exposure to show the protagonist’s dream world. La Calumnia (1946–1948), nineteen minutes long, is more narrative: it uses extreme close-ups, high and low angles to intensify emotion. Todo es según el color… (1952 or 1953), around eighteen minutes long and scripted by Ángel G. Gauna, was shot in markedly urban locations —inside the stock exchange during a trading session, the port from the top of the San Sebastián tower, railway tracks— and alternates colour and black-and-white images to contrast optimism and pessimism.

Emili Godes’s modernity was not a style reserved for his personal images. It also appears in the commissions he carried out for companies, scientific institutions, doctors, artists and film studios. His ability to meet specific needs without giving up his own way of seeing explains the profound unity of an apparently very diverse body of work.

The best example of this synthesis is his report on Laboratorios del Dr. Esteve. In 1942 the company opened its new headquarters in the Guinardó district, and the Arxiu Històric Fotogràfic del IEFC holds around a hundred original negatives by Godes that document the facilities in full. The final prints have not been located, not even within the company itself, where there was no record that these images existed.

It is a report produced during the harshest years of the post-war period, when ideological and cultural repression was at its most suffocating. Yet these photographs retain a freshness in conception, aesthetics and framing that brings them closer to the iconography of the Republic than to the aesthetic of the new regime. Better than any other series, they show the extent to which Godes had incorporated the modernity of the avant-gardes into his professional practice, far beyond photographs made for competitions.