Charles Clifford and the monumental record of Spain

  SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 - FEBRUARY 8, 2026

Commissioners: Javier Piñar and Carlos Sánchez
Space: Rooms Floor -1

The image of Spain during the 19th century cannot be conceived without the figure of the British photographer Charles Clifford (1819-1863), a pioneer in using photography as a novel instrument for the international projection of the image of our country. He belongs to the generation of early professional photographers who used the calotype as a tool for research and projection of new themes and forms of expression. Passionate about the expressive possibilities offered by the new photographic technology, they opened new paths to connect it closely with the modernization actions that marked the present and also with the cult of the past that fed the nationalist discourses, masterfully expressed in the graphic inventory of its monumental heritage.

Behind the apparent continuity and unity of style that his work shows, many technological mutations can be detected in it, driven by the adoption of new cameras, new sensitive supports and personal developing procedures, just as numerous changes in the motifs of photographic interest occur in his work. Interested in everything that was happening in Spain, but also conditioned by the varied nature of the commissions he had to accept in order to survive, disparate subjects coexist in his work. And they coexist with a great deal of harmony, as if they were all part of the same photographic discourse aimed at showing Spaniards the values of their own country and surprising European viewers with the uniqueness of that world that stretched behind the Pyrenees, half in the East and half in the West, half in the West, half in the picturesque past and half in modernity.

However, his photographic production has a great thematic coherence because it focuses his concern on the entity and the evolution of Spain's monumental heritage, which focuses his attention and guides the thematic selection he makes in his Álbum Monumental de España, the project that is the protagonist of this exhibition.

Clifford began his career with photography around 1850, ending it abruptly with his death in January 1863. During little more than a decade of activity, he evolved technically from the daguerreotype to the calotype and, from 1855, to the collodion negative and positive on albuminated paper. At the same time, he abandoned early on the activity of portraiture, oriented towards the recording of urban and monumental landscapes, and diversified his clientele and channels of diffusion as he expanded and consolidated his themes, receiving very diverse commissions from academics, architects, engineers, nobility and Spanish, French and British royal families. For many of them he would create monographic albums, and thanks to the thematic opportunities provided by the commissions, as well as by the images collected on his own initiative, he generated an extensive archive of images of Spain, part of which he published in the editorial initiatives Scramble through Spain and the Álbum Monumental de España, which made his work known throughout Europe and would make him an inescapable reference for the image of Spain.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

30 SEPT 19H. Masterclass with the curators. Theater

WITH THE SUPPORT OF