JULIA TORO AND THE RECORD OF THE EVERYDAY IN THE CHILEAN DICTATORSHIP
The Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid hosts the first exhibition in Spain of veteran photographer and visual artist Julia Toro (Talca, Chile, 1933). Her photographic production yields to both simplicity and wonder, frameworks that delimit and amplify the everyday themes she addresses. The protagonists of this cyclical, customary flow of life in her work are diverse, and their problems and experiences drift among the concepts of love, pain, memory, and relationship with their surroundings.
Estado fotográfico presents photographs taken mostly during the dictatorial period of Pinochet’s Chile. Her snapshots reflect life in a country that was, in a sense, intimidated, yet pragmatic enough to find in the daily life of friends, family, and shared actions a tool for the survival of the ordinary.
Toro records this daily life without the filter of constriction, alternating her shots to capture the vital essence from both distance and aesthetic. Her photographs become an intimate and collective testimony of that era, acknowledging a certain objectivity in the treatment of her subjects while leaving explicit political evidence aside, working it instead from a far subtler plane.
Julia Toro. Estado fotográfico can be seen until November 9 at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Serrano 122, Madrid (Spain).
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