Yesterday's photographs are today's world

 

Max Saula (Barcelona, 19 years old) was born when Google already existed, Apple was about to launch its first iPhone, and the emergence of Instagram was imminent. He belongs to the generation of digital natives, so one might expect him to represent the divide between that old world and this new one we grapple with, marked by an overabundance of images. However, with "Inheriting Dreams," the exhibition he has curated at the Alta gallery in Andorra, Max challenges this notion and proposes a utopia where a different relationship with photography remains possible.

 

It's important to note that Max is the son of Pancho Saula, the gallery owner and photography collector, who raised him with deep respect for historical imagery. So it's no coincidence that 20th-century photographs predominate in his selection for the exhibition.

 

On display are reflections on light and movement that carry forward the investigations of the early artistic avant-garde (Gjon Mili), nods to classical pictorialism (Dorothy Norman), the energy of urban color captured through poetic ambition (Joel Meyerowitz), the instant as sculpture made of time and movement (Harold Edgerton), and details of urban life transformed into flashes of contagious vitality (Weegee). It's reassuring to confirm that none of this has lost its relevance, and that we can still forge emotional connections with images. Yesterday's world, young Max Saula seems to suggest, lives on in today's.