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37, Calle Real. In this ground floor of an old house, in the traditional principal commercial and strolling area for the Coruñian people, a long photographic dedication was forged at the beginning of the twenties, pioneered in Galicia and uninterrupted over the century. A shop window in which strange was the Coruñian who didn´t stop to contemplate and comment on the latest events and snaps of the city or its social life, while they headed along the ritual walk of los Cantones, la Calle Real, Riego de Agua…
Who was the personality behind “Foto Blanco”, don Angel Blanco? Well like those anonymous medieval artists, someone who knew how to keep a plan secret so as others reached recognition through the images!. Someone who if the reader observes carefully appears in the 1933, Virgen de los Dolores procession, camara in hand and the lazarillo helper loading the film. Someone who was always in the thick of the photographic profession. From such continuous work an impressive archive of more the 7.000.000 negatives emerged, taken by a group of photographers associated over the years at different moments in the business . From this legacy like many other previous publications and exhibitions, this magnificent book about the city was conceived. An essential document for all those, Coruñian or not who want to know the history of the evolution of a city in the 20th century in depth. And so, this is the visual and printed chronicle of the evolution of La Coruña. A record of the highest documental value. An unavoidable testament of the past and the present, a memorable run over the rhythms and events of a historic time as extremely changeable as this is mixed up, problematic and feverish. This was the last century, just as the canonical tango taught us. The reader has the occasion to enjoy a document that is not only of photographic value, but also of historic, social, architectural, urban, anthropological and cultural. From moments of historical importance or distinct social change to an attentive evocation of daily life, with the interjection of anecdotic, the unexpected or literary. In the world of photography these prints of a time gone by always have an unavoidably proustian charm, in which the retina and the heart reclaim the fullness of unreturnable time not from the aromatic sensation of the novelist’s madalena but from the tobacco coloured sepia of the old photographic images.
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