North of Africa

Ortiz Echagüe

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This is the book that Ortiz Echagüe wished to make, but was never published: “I enriched my copious archive with so many negatives from Africa that I am always thinking about devoting another book of the same importance to those that I have already published”, he once stated. This region had a great influence over his view as an author because it was there that he took his first photographs when he belonged to the Engineering Corps of the Spanish Army in the early 1910s, and it was the place chosen by him to end his long career, making three trips to Morocco between 1964 and 1966. Now, on these pages, there is the gathering of a selection of portraits, landscapes and architectures of the North of Africa, thanks to a meticulous work of conservation carried out by the University of Navarra Museum, as well as the research undertaken by the curator and academic Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, the grandson of the photographer, who has written the thorough essay that accompanies this work: “In Morocco the most fertile period of experimentation of Ortiz Echagüe’s career was produced, and from this was born the working method that he would apply in the major series dealing with Spain that he carried out over the following decades”. This edition preserves the spirit of the books that Ortiz Echagüe published during his lifetime: Spanische Köpfe (1929), Tipos y trajes de España (1930), España. Pueblos y paisajes (1939) and España. Castillos y alcázares (1956), but above all it is inspired by the first of these
works, which was published in Berlin and contained eighty photographs.