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The reader will perceive the transition from a more provincial city with an almost rural air to another more cosmopolitan and more open, although logically also noisier, with more opportunities but also more population. Some will miss the peace, the apparent stillness of time, the sepia of a tamer life. Others celebrate the rhythm, the tension, the present possibilities of getting ahead. Let´s keep in mind, that in that mutation this city where people knew how to live in an intelligent vital manner, in times of unstoppable globalisation, so often stressing, of hard competition and the fear of losing social security, can continue conserving that hedonistic aura, that happy tolerant, open, vitalist, peripathetic and friendly spirit. As much its “desarrollista” past as urban speculation have left its scars, but the city survives within a noticeable vitality. It´s undoubtable that its growth over the last two centuries, the city has lost a part of the grace and beauty of its original and natural enclave, in the way we have seen knocked down numerous galleries and patrimonial buildings which constituted a decisive referential singularity and perhaps it´s gone on shaping, as most cities in our time, like a city, in general terms, less distinguishable, with the existence of neighbourhoods lacking in personality that establish a dialect –already spoken in its day by the extraordinary and sensitive chronicler Carlos Martínez Barbeito –between a privileged center and a periphery of neighbourhoods where one lives in a more familiar and everyday way. Of course the city on the other hand has reached a more modern, bustling and dynamic air, with an extraordinary diversification of services for its citizens, which perhaps demonstrates in the Planetario, la Casa de los Peces, la Domus, Alvedro Airport, San Pedro Park, la Maestranza, the University Campus, and the Paseo Marítimo, some of its more ambitious and defining present interventions.
PRIVILEDGED AIR AND LIGHT. I wish for a future that is cultured, atlantic, European, cosmopolitan, and hanseatic, one which outlines this city, so open and modern, anfibian and oceanic, of such particular spirit and which possesses such and indefinable and singular air and light like those enlightened by such lucid analysts like Martinez-Barbeito, González Garcés, Otero Pedrayo, and many others, including illustrious visitors and travellers. They are that light and that air indefinably atlantic which inspired the great Cunqueiro, in 1951, in a beautiful article in the Faro de Vigo, an emotive enlightening evocation, literary and sentimental, worthy of being read under one of those light coloured parasols that happily splash the terrazas today, or in one of those delicate and vermerianos interiors which recreate the fine lace of light and the intimate transparency of the glass galleries, while on the dock, heading towards other waters, the seagull white of an enormous liner leaves: We never tire of remembering how sometimes in the seaside galleries of La Coruña the wing of a boreal aurora rests and then the dazzled eyes of the traveller are offered a light which is all at once water, fire, glass, and wind. I would even dare to think that this light is not found in great painting or is brought to La Coruña by the beautiful boreal auroras. It is the light from submerged cities, that of Avalones de la matière de Bretagne, that of grey ambar palaces, and mermaid rock crystal. It is the submarine mid-day light from the countries taken to the bottom of the Atlantic by fantasy long ago. If I were making tourist propaganda for La Coruña I would advertise, rather than so much beauty, the grace, happiness and life the city encapsulates, the incomparable prodigy, the fabulous gift of so much and so extreme light”. With this vision of a privileged aura and light, is logical to congratulate Foto Blanco and its most referential photographers through time for their work within Coruñian and Galician photography. The book is now an open instrument in the hands of the reader, in which each one will make his own personal and untransferable journey. Like Cortázar´s “Rayuela” can make an approach in a lineal way or making the pertinent skips shown at the foot of the photo for different moments of identical reality. Didactic and entertaining, informative and cultural, suitable for the photographer or the historian, the documentalist or the architect, the tourist, the curious or citizens in general, it´s undoubtable that this book is bound to leave deep prints in the retinas of time and memory.
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