To make a family photo you need several generations. In other words, a human distribution in the photo in which the viewer perceives a defined and effective distribution of the frailness or the toughness, the strength or the weakness, the fortune or the bad luck.
Txema Salvans’ skill – or technique (¿) – consists of eliminating this labour of time and violence. His potos draw instantaneously family groups, true-to- life but possibility inexistent. His potos of diverse groups of people from all over the map of Spain – sometimes groups that aren’t families; sometimesgroups of people who don’t even know each other – are in essence familia photos. His potos are of families – and that have only got together for a photo. In a photo by Txema Salvans you can always see, for example, who is going to have the most problems. Or who’s dead.
With this book of potos – with the text by the journalist Guillem Martínez – the reader is invited to delve into the family logic of families that have, perhaps, never happened.
Guillem Martinez
