Junto a las vías. Santander (Beside the Railway Tracks. Santander)

According to the critic Josep María Casademont, the Madrid school photographers took independent rather than sequential photographs, in which form dominates content. These are usually “ambient-portraits”, a speciality that Leonardo Cantero, Gabriel Cualladó, Juan Dolcet, Francisco Gómez, Fernando Gordillo, Ramón Masats, Francisco Ontañón and Gerardo Vielba mastered with “great skill”. One good example is the photograph by Gerardo Vielba, aeronautical engineer, member of the Madrid Royal Photographic Society and AFAL, and one of the principal members of the Escuela de Madrid group. The formalist composition and the static nature of the subjects are features of Vielba’s elegant style. As a friend of artists and critics who supported Abstract art, Vielba recognised that what was most important lay in the form: “A something of a higher order is perhaps neither within nor dependent on the ‘something’ to say, even if that idea is strongly emphasised, so much as the ‘how’ to say it.”

Horacio Fernández