Carlos Saura: Vanished Spain

As a freelance photographer Carlos Saura drove his first car through 1950s Spain, a country living under a dictatorship, mired in poverty, backward and isolated, still showing the marks of the Civil War. With sharp gaze, Carlos Saura captured unforgettable images of a harsh land and a long-suffering population, history’s losers but with their human dignity and vitality unbroken. The photography book that Saura was planning in those years never came to fruition. Now, more than half a century later, Steidl has taken up the old idea and produced the book Vanished Spain, by Carlos Saura, whose Spanish version is co-published with Círculo del Arte and La Fábrica. To mark the publishing event, the publishers have organized the travelling exhibition Carlos Saura fotógrafo. España años 50, which brings together a broad sample of those historic images which today strike the observer as a visual chronicle of a Spain lost in the mists of time.