MADRID.- The great collective exhibition of PHotoEspaña 2009, The 70's Photography and Everyday life was presented this week with the presence of the director of Teatro Fernán Gómez. Centro de Arte and PHotoEspaña, Mora Apreda and Claude Bussac.

The curator of the exhibitions Sérgio Mah and Paul Wombell talked about the show and the aesthetic approaches of those years. The artists Alberto García-Alix, Carlos Pazos and Víctor Kolár were present at the press conference.

The exhibition The Seventies. Photography and Everyday Life co-produced by Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Museo D’Arte Provincia di Nuoro and La Fábrica/PHotoEspaña in collaboration with Fundación Banco Santander, seeks to provide a retrospective look at a group of works and artists that contributed to making the nineteen seventies one of the most important and fruitful periods in the recent history of photography. This group show, which includes over 200 photographs, covers some twenty outstanding figures in the visual arts field of that time, and offers a wide, diverse range of images that exemplify the period as well as a selection of its conceptual and aesthetic attitudes.

The nineteen seventies witnessed a definitive change in the relationship between art and photography, and comprise a period that is essential for understanding the contemporary art of the last 35 years. The aesthetic approaches of avant-gardes concerned with purely formal questions gave way to a more open, less dogmatic artistic attitude in which some attention had to be paid to life experience and social issues. The decade produced a greater interrelationship between art and life that led to an interest in defending the everyday, the poetics of the personal and the landscape of the intimate in addition to unconventional documentary approaches. Art ceased to be considered something external to the artist and began to be part of the creator’s attitude toward life. Photography was seen as an ideal tool for this artistic and historical context, and the photographic medium was reformulated.