Bledayrosa

Just as the madeleine was for Marcel Proust, the landscape is the trigger for the investigation of memories and traces for María Bleda and José María Rosa. The artistic partners, known as Bleda y Rosa, have for years explored the seemingly empty settings in a series of works starting with Campos de Fútbol (Football Pitches, 1992–95), Campos de Batalla (Battlefields, 1995-96), and Origen (Origin, 2003–05). Their work is spare, elegant, simple, and purely documentary, yet it is intensely evocative of the way photography and text interact to give meaning to the presence of absence.

In his essay, “Football Pitches: The Glance That Follows Desolation,” the critic Santiago Olmo states, “There are few visions containing a greater weight of desolation than the empty image, surrounded by silence, of sites envisaged and conceived for receiving events such as shows, games, meetings, or any collective action of a social nature. The absence of life is equivalent to the most radical presence of death.” The poignancy of scenes of places designed for events, that remain marked by those events—games, battles, human settlements—in the form of scars and traces in the ground yet devoid of a visible human presence is at the root of Bleda y Rosa’s work. The rusting goalposts with rotting or entirely missing nets and the scuffmarks on barren, packed earth are mute testimony to the games that took place there. Images such as El Ballestero (1992), Burriana I (1994), and Burriana II (1994), are cases in point. These pitches, most often on the edges of working-class areas, are now resisting the attempts of nature to erase the very signs of a transitory human presence. As the body is scarred and marked by a lifetime of work and life, so is the landscape, and both become a visible text or palimpsest of a history played out on its surfaces.

This unspoken history is marked by its inevitable, invisible disappearance made visible in Bleda y Rosa’s photographs. This is especially true in their later documentary work focused on ancient battlefields in Spain. Others have noted that history is written by the winners. Yet this is not entirely the case, for usually there are some survivors whose stories ultimately emerge to present differing points of view and another, perhaps equally unreliable, version of history. It is difficult to see in a given landscape, one mostly reclaimed by nature, if something as climactic as a battle took place one hundred or one thousand years earlier. The landscape, like history, is mutable and rewritten by the passage of time. Works like Sagunto, Spring 219 AD, Covadonga, 718 AD, Alarcos, 19 July 1195, Fields of Bailén, 1808, Mendaza, Winter 1834 are all but illegible as historical scenes without text, but with it they become parts of the narrative of the founding of Spain. The act of fixing an image of such a site is an attempt to wrest it from transience and to reinscribe a meaning by affixing through a caption a literal representation of what happened once upon a time. The interaction of the title and the image transposes the mere image—in the case of the Campos de Batalla diptychs—into the human historical dimension. Words evoke the history of the event by naming and contextualizing it. Where there were only empty stones and fields, the cries and screams of warriors are evoked. By the act of naming something, by declaring this site to be a landscape where such an event took place, Bleda y Rosa reclaim it from meaninglessness.

In their later works Bleda y Rosa delve deeper into the all but irreclaimable past. Origen is a body of work that seeks to put a human face on the landscapes of our very beginnings as human beings. Homo neanderthalensis, Neander Valley (2004), Cro-Magnon Man, Les Eyzies de Tayac (2004), Java Man, Trinil (2007), all depict landscapes, beautiful or banal as we may see them. Yet apparently they are the sites where the earliest human beings settled. As landscapes, they appear unmarked by humans—and indeed humans are the makers of marks, the basic tools of language, and therefore history—and out of time. Yet through the addition of text they become part of history. Words give birth to order and transpose a simple photograph of a barren landscape into a historical document.

To return to Santiago Olmo, the seemingly empty images that Bleda y Rosa present are fulfilled with the suggested histories conjured up by their captions. The presence of absence that we see in these simple yet carefully constructed images is imbued with meaning that may be seen sometimes to be inscribed in the landscape but that is made plain through their captions. The sign and signifier, the photograph, becomes a historical document. This use of photography and text sets Bleda y Rosa apart from most other photographers by pushing against the limits of what can be represented through the medium. In short, they provide meaning where most of us, gazing at an empty field, would find none. They pull off a culturally significant magic act by playing on the power of suggestion evoked by words and breathe life into still images. In the beginning was the word, and the word gave meaning to the universe. It does the same for the photograph.