Volume 4, Number 1 · February 11, 1965
The Faces of Spain
By J.H. Elliott
The Presence of Spain
by James Morris, photographs by Evelyn Hofer
Harcourt, Brace & World, 119 pp., $15
An Explanation of Spain
by Eléna de La Souchère
Random House, 369 pp., $6.95
Take a look at Evelyn Hofer's photographs in James Morris's The Presence of Spain. Probably no other photographer has got Spain so instinctively right. The nuns, the lottery-sellers, the shaft of sunlight on the Romanesque cloister—here, sharply delineated, and only occasionally over-dramatized—is Spain as it is: a country at once timeless and time-worn, a country frozen, in that brilliant sunshine, into a succession of immobile façades which yet dissolve as you look at them, to reveal the vigor and the misery, the integrity and the emptiness, that lie beneath. Everything is here; everything, at least, which emphasizes the solitary and the individualistic in the life of the Spaniard. For, if Miss Hofer's camera misses anything, it is the sociability and gregariousness which represent the other side of the coin. Her Spain is essentially the Spain of the monk and the shepherd, lonely figures lost in immense landscapes, clinging to their identity in the midst of nothingness. But where is that other Spain, convivial, affable, and totally indifferent to the demands of privacy? The Spain, above all, of the café and the railway compartment; the Spain not of the individual but the group?
Review, 1746 words
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