Collector, art critica, advisor, exhibition curator. We are talking   about   Lola   Garrido, whom we are going to try to get to know a little more today. 

Born in San Sebastian   (Basque Country, Spain), pioneer of collecting in Spain and in love with art, she exudes passion in everything she does; her collection is close to a thousand pieces.  Innovative, hyperactive, an authority in photography and with a very personal   look, Lola speaks a little about herself and her work.

First of all, thank you very much for helping us and letting us use a little of your time to do this interview. How it all started? How did you start to dedicate to collecting?

It started as things start in my life: suddenly. Collecting is an obsessive-compulsive disorder and I think we all suffer from one, in my case I had spent years dedicating  myself to art and making photographic exhibitions in Madrid. I can almost say  that I started the great exhibitions that took place in the Canal de Isabel II. I was an adviser “for everything” of the newly released Madrid autonomy. They were years of meeting many of the great photographers. From Newton to Klein, to Cartier-Bresson, Alex Webb, Inge Morath etc.

Why did you choose precisely photographic collecting?

My life was a pure image. The cinema was and continues to be my passion and I read literature with pleasure, so photography combined the two themes because it was an image that philosophized and told what you wanted or you had in your head. Because a picture is worth more than a thousand words if you have them intellectually and emotionally in your head.  

When and where did you buy your first photo?

 In Paris I had gone to a meeting with a Magnum  photographer (Harry Gruyaert) who wanted to exhibit in Madrid and it happened that I had the  opportunity to go to the  gallery - I always did - I was mesmerized by an image of André Kertész  entitled “Jeno, Dunaharaszti Hungary”  of 1929 and I bought it. A 1919 image of a swimmer, with a lot of grain and a very modern cut. I already liked the author, so that was the first and I still like it as the first day. The same cannot be said of all the “crushes”.

André Kérstész

Do you have an abundant collection?

My collection has about 900 works considering that it has three parts: “A brief history of photography, Women are beautiful by Garry Winogrand and one of 80 pieces on fashion photography. Fashion and cinema have always gone hand in hand, and in Hollywood” golden age photographers portrayed the stars on their pages. Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo were the models of women. The works of the photographers bear witness to the feminine image, the desire and the industry of those years. And fashion is the thermometer of the times.

Walker Evans

You have work of the classics. What are your preferences? 

My preferences lean more and more towards the difficult works (I am not a mother, but I know what happens) and it happens that those that are good seem easy but when you give them an inside look they are also transverse. A collection is based on a budget. And I have never worked with a consultant because I have been an art professional all my life.  

Among my favorites are eight masterpieces by Dorothea Lange, in which I could not miss “Migrant Mother”. The emigrant mother had a name: Florence Owens Thompson, her name was never known until 1976, and yet perhaps for this reason, Dorothea Lange`s photo becomes a post-conceptual image when we see in her face the synthesis of an impoverished America, fighter, worthy. 

As a documentary, the photos of Lange were perfect: aesthetically effective, and “without sugar”: photographs that captured a dignified humanity, despite the misfortune, without falling into easy sentimentality. Dorothea Lange became the most paradigmatic photographer of the FSA and who more than fulfilled the mission entrusted by the agency: to document the poverty of the people and,

as she herself out it “her pride, her strength and her spirit”

Man Ray

“Women are beautiful” by Gary Winogrand. How did you buy it? Where? Tell us a little why that collection precisely.

I bought it in San Francisco at an auction in 1995, and I came to it through a family member of Garry Winogrand himself. This collection belongs to what I would call my deep feeling (the liberation of women). In the 60’s when the metoo began, Winogrand toured the streets of Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco portraying women in the streets. These were moments of liberation, women went out alone, women manifested themselves, they took off their clothes and Winogrand  made the portraits in which the editorial is written and could carry the title of “When attitudes become forms” Winogrand tried to contain that the frenetic vision of the photographer is unique, among other things because, as noted by the curator Leo Rubinfien, “often worked hastily, preferring to spend another day shooting, rather than processing his film or editing   his images.”

As a collector, do you buy what you like or does the investment criterion prevail? 

I have never bought anything for investment. The only thing was some stock exchange actions that are generally good investments for the banks. 

Henry Cartier-Bresson

Would you like to have a photograph of Brassai? 

Yes, in fact I have one, but I never had the opportunity to buy the one I wanted.

Lola, is collecting addictive or obsessive?

It is the two things, if you start, you are addicted, because the images scream and as sometimes you cannot acquire them, it becomes an obsession. I have to say that I am already in the healing phase. I have already enjoyed them through exhibitions around the world. I have seen them in different settings, different spaces. Truth said, this becomes the only way to see what is good and what is left over in my collection.

Robert Frank

Where do I start if I want to become a collector of photographs? 

At the beginning, ja ja ja. You buy one, then another one and starting from three it is already a collection.

Alexander Rodchenko

What would you recommend to someone who wants to start with photographic collecting?

Just read and see a lot, and from knowing what photography and art are, buy what really provokes an intellectual or emotional reaction. 

Robert Mapplethorpe

Do you recommend a book especially to start collecting?

Many, there is much now, I would recommend the catalog of the exhibition “Waking dream “of the Gilmar  Paper Company  collection made by the  Metropolitan of New York.

How is photographic collecting in Spain? Does it exist? Is the subject treated in the same way in the rest of Europe? Is there a greater culture and interest in photographic collecting?

Little, scarce and less important than in France, England or Italy, to say three countries.

Diane Arbus

Does it harm a private collector that public institutions acquire collections at the prices they purchase?

No, rather the opposite. In a world in which photographers and collectors have works that may interest museums, it is normal to acquire them. The galleries also sell so the market has to be open to different ways of seeing and selecting.

The famous image of Capa of the Spanish civil war, do you have it? What do you think about the latest research on its veracity?  

I have “the death of a militiaman”, it was offered to me by Cornell Capa, brother of Robert, and I thought I should pay him this homage. From my point of view, it does not have the slightest interest that it was a composition made for the photo. Thanks to Capa’s intelligence and that photo, the Spanish civil war was placed in the eye of the world. I think they have shown that it is not real, but there is no greater reality about the war in Spain. The photographs have lost their original meanings. Now they have new space for the meanings we give them.

You define yourself as an ex-curator of exhibitions, critic without remission, collector by vocation, neurotic by genetics, autarchic of birth and neurotic by entertainment. Ex Commissioner? Do you no longer curate?

More than curator, which is a word that on the one hand provokes rejection and on the other it is very big for me; what I have done is to organize exhibitions, choose and express what is in some way exposing a knowledge of my own that fits with a certain “taste” amateur or professional of a genre, which in most cases has been the photographic.

William Klein

Photographer Minor Martin White, founder of Aperture magazine, once lamented that he is a first- class “practitioner” of second-class art. Do you feel like a first-class collector of second-class art?

Classes are for means of transportation and for certain people who believe they travel through life in a higher class. Photography is from its beginnings in the same place as all plastic art. Discussions about “high and low culture”; define only those who provoke them.

In what places have you exhibited your work?

Moscow (Pushkin Museum), Korea, Mexico, Brussels, Nice, Switzerland, Poland, Dusseldorf, Valladolid, Burgos, Madrid, San Sebastian and some more.

n the recent exhibition of San Sebastian there has been a record of assistance, I think about 10,000 spectators. Why do you think it had that success?

In the end, 17,000 spectators went through the exhibition, which for a city of 140,000 people means that more than 10% saw it. These are things that thrill because it was not really intended to be exposed but   to give free rein to an almost physical personal need.

Where will the next exhibition of your work be?

Probably in Aachen “Women are beautiful” will be exhibited, a place where I also exhibited my collection under the title of “In the Stream of time” 

By the way, are you a photographer?

No no. I am addicted to the iphonomanía, I carry the phone and I do some mediocre photos that I sometimes like and I hang them on Instagram, that place that admits you tell your narcissism as if they were something interesting.

You are also a writer. You have written and participated in some books. Tell us about that experience, write, publish …

Writing, I do not write, only some short texts, presentations, and yes I have edited books because I like to rummage and in the end they even gave me an editing prize. Writing is a very big word for any reader. Photography, like all other arts, “has succumbed to observers. When he feels the eyes on himself he becomes everything they see” Elias Canetti).

Lola Garrido Armendáriz, thank you very much for your time. It has been a pleasure for me to carry out this interview. I hope to see you soon.