Barcelona can see for the first time a collection of photography that has been a mystery for more than fifteen years. These are more than four thousand negatives that appeared in 2005 in a container on a street in Palma de Mallorca, of great historical value on the seafaring activity of Barcelona between 1940 and 1960. The author of the photographs, unknown until last year, it was the businessman and chemist Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol (1904-1979). His family inaugurated this Thursday the exhibition that the Barcelona Maritime Museum (MMB) dedicates to him until the month of October, Found images. Post-war maritime Barcelona.
The MMB has selected 130 images of Tusquets with a post-war testimonial value that experts consider of the first magnitude. Silvia Dahl, photography curator at the MMB, gave as an example yesterday the fact that sailing ships appeared in many images of the port: this is because, in the years after the civil war, fuel was a commodity that few sailors they could afford, so boats from the past were recovered. Another detail appreciated by the curators of the exhibition are the ships that in the first half of the 1940s carried, in an unusual way, a Spanish flag: as they were ships from a neutral country in World War II, the insignia were the identified so they would not be torpedoed by a submarine of the powers in conflict.
Joaquín Tusquets was a member of a small community of amateur photographers with high purchasing power; This allowed them to acquire material that was difficult to find in the postwar period, beginning with the same cameras that Tusquets used in what his children have described as “weekend photography excursions.” His main equipment, a Leica camera and the one he used the most, a Rolleiflex, are on display at the MMB.
Another aspect highlighted by those in charge of the exhibition is the theme of Tusquets’s work, especially moments of leisure and aseptic portraits in which Franco’s repression and prevailing poverty remain on the sidelines: “Tusquets’s photography is governed by the guidelines of the time, which valued a ‘friendly’ theme, classical composition and careful technique ”, the exhibition reports:“ This was the usual practice during the first two decades of the dictatorship, which marked an uncritical distance from political and social reality from the country”.
The mystery about Tusquets broke online in 2020 when several fans shared some images of his legacy. The person who had found them discarded in Palma de Mallorca, the collector Toni Amengual, had digitized the collection and sent some copies to his acquaintances. The photographs captured the attention of numerous users on the networks and the case was followed by the media. Amengual had already tried to sell the file to the MMB in 2018, without success. Finally, the museum acquired them last June with funds from the Barcelona Provincial Council.
In fact, the first clue about the author of the photographs was provided in 2006 from Mallorca by the journalist Andreu Manresa. He reported in an article in EL PAÍS that one of the few envelopes of negatives that Tusquets had developed in a professional laboratory had the surname “Señor Tusquets” written in ballpoint pen – most of the reels were revealed by himself, with the expertise that gave his training as a chemist.
Your child, the key clue
The authorship of the collection found in Palma was discovered by this newspaper in 2020 after Amengual provided another clue: in some portraits two names were written by hand: “Joaquinito” and Rosa. The deduction was that “Joaquinito” was the diminutive of his son and that, therefore, the father and photographer could be called Joaquín. Indeed, in the newspaper archives of the newspapers of the time there was a Joaquín Tusquets who regularly participated in amateur photography competitions. Rosa was his wife’s name, another piece of information that just confirmed her identity. One of the novelties offered by the exhibition are the documents that testify that Tusquets had already exhibited his work at the MMB, specifically in two photography competitions organized by the museum, one of which was Spanish, in 1948 – he was on the 24th in the competition. – and another in 1961, in which he won a fourth prize.
The family still does not clarify how the collection got to a container in Palma de Mallorca; Amengual explained that he found it lying in front of an antique store. Enrique Tusquets, son of the photographer, explains that the family is inventorying the photographs they have kept of his father from 1959, images that can uncover new secrets.
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