There are books that explain a country, and then there are books that catch it with its mouth open, its knees dirty, its saints sweating, and its dignity somewhere between devotion and delirium. España oculta, by Cristina García Rodero, belongs to the second, more dangerous category. Published by Lunwerg in 1989, with 126 pages of black-and-white photographs, the book appeared in connection with an exhibition at the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo.

García Rodero began this long pilgrimage in 1973, thanks to a Fundación Juan March grant that allowed her to travel through Spanish villages and document their festivals, ceremonies, rites, traditions, and ways of life. That bureaucratic miracle, for once, produced something other than paperwork. It produced one of the great photographic books of modern Spain.

The book is anthropological, yes, but only in the way a confession, a wake, or a village drunk can be anthropological: because nobody there is trying to become material for a thesis. García Rodero does not photograph folklore as decoration. There is no postcard Spain here, no charming old ladies arranged for cultural consumption, no rural souvenir for people who like poverty provided it comes with good framing. Her Spain is physical, contradictory, theatrical, wounded, funny, devout, obscene, tender, and frightening, often all within the same frame.

There is wool, wax, sweat, poor lighting, black shoes, children who already look as if they have understood too much, old women with faces like folded maps, men carrying saints as if carrying furniture for the afterlife. There are processions, masks, bodies, animals, priests, mourners, dancers, villagers, cripples, brides, corpses, boys staring too hard, and faces that seem to have been waiting for the camera since the Council of Trent.

The black and white is not an aesthetic preference. It is a moral weapon. Colour would have made many of these scenes picturesque, and picturesque is usually where truth goes to be embalmed. In monochrome, everything becomes bone, cloth, skin, dust, shadow, gesture. Faces do not appear; they emerge. Bodies do not pose; they endure. Nobody is decorative here. Not even the children. Especially not the saints.

The title, España oculta, is perfect because it does not name an unknown Spain so much as a Spain that polite Spain preferred not to see. The hidden thing was not buried. It was walking down the street under a hood, kissing a relic, dragging itself through mud, throwing itself into a festival, or staring back at the camera with the grave suspicion of someone who knows perfectly well that modernity is just another costume, slightly better ironed.

Magnum has described García Rodero’s work as deeply concerned with human dualities and contradictions: religious and pagan, natural and supernatural, life and death, pleasure and pain, city and countryside, old and new. That is accurate, though a little too clean. In España oculta, what we really see is a Catholicism full of pagan elbows, a joy that looks like mourning, a mourning that has learned to dance, and a country capable of kneeling without ever quite becoming humble.

The strongest thing in the book is García Rodero’s patience. She understands that a photograph is not made by arriving. It is made by staying. She does not parachute into tradition, steal a little exoticism, and leave before lunch. She waits. She lets the ritual become tired enough to reveal the human being inside it. That is why the images are not merely “about customs.” They are about hunger, shame, pride, fear, boredom, desire, childhood, old age, and that national talent for surviving while pretending everything is normal.

The project’s importance was recognized quickly. España oculta won Book of the Year at Rencontres d’Arles, and García Rodero also received the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant in 1989. Awards are the least interesting part of the matter, as usual, that official confetti people throw when art has already done the damage. But in this case the recognition was deserved.

What remains, after closing the book, is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is too comfortable, too upholstered. What remains is the unpleasant sensation that modern Spain did not replace this hidden Spain. It merely painted the walls, installed better lighting, opened a shopping centre nearby, and asked the old ghosts to stand slightly off-camera.

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