Ibiza - 100 Years of Light & Shade

Martin Davies, an English teacher and former curator in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Parisian-born Philippe Derville, an enthusiast of old photographs have worked closely together to complete this book. Martin Davies has spent much of the previous six years investigating the island’s traditional architecture and has also built up a collection of old travel books, postcards and photographs relating to Ibiza. Likewise Philippe Derville is a long-time collector of old photos depicting marine life in and around Ibiza and Barcelona.

It took fifteen months to complete the project. Perhaps the most interesting discovery was the Austro-Croatian baron, Mario von Bucovich, whose work was unearthed in two archives, one in the Netherlands, the other in Palma de Mallorca. Author of two classic photobooks of Paris and Berlin, he toured the Pityuses extensively in 1934, capturing authentic scenes at annual pig-killing feasts (matances).

Almost at the same time in Paris, the ex-Dadaist Raoul Hausmann was falling love with a young Neue Sachlichkeit photographer, Elfriede Stegemeyer. Back in Ibiza, the two went on photographic field trips, setting up their tripods side-by-side but managing to produce completely different visions of the island. The front-cover of Stegemeyer’s unpublished album, now in a private collection in Normandy, is here shown for the very first time.

The search for photos was accompanied by a search for texts. Biographical résumés of the photographers was the first priority, for which information was gathered from families, friends, books and websites. For the introduction, the initial idea was to use a text by a well-known writer, but as the stories around the photographers themselves emerged, it seemed appropriate to write a specially-tailored text. To this was added Raoul Hausmann’s account of the art of photography in Ibiza.

Captions too were researched, bringing in the expertise of fishermen, parish priests and dozens of elderly country people. A snapshot from an archive in Zurich or Amsterdam would act like a key, unlocking parts of their memories which had been sealed off for decades. Finally, some literary extracts were included, whose words seemed to bring out something hinted at in the pictures.

Catalan, Spanish and English are the main languages, while German and French translations of the introductory texts are included. Extracts are in their original language, with Spanish, Catalan and English translations. Dimensions: 269 pages, 170 black and white plates, 22 x 17 cm