Most look at the camera. They do it seriously or smiling, with jewelry around their necks or simple clothes. They have hairstyles from another era and many pose alone, although there are also groups that suggest family ties. Its main characteristic is that all the protagonists are women. Also that they are anonymous. Nobody knows the name of the residents of Ronda (Málaga, 33,401 inhabitants) who star in the more than 300 photographs that have been made available at the Real Maestranza de Caballería in this Malaga city by an amateur. The entity has now set itself the objective of identifying each of the portrayed. This is the icing on the cake for Documenta Ronda, one of the projects with which the 450th anniversary of the institution is celebrated, which aims to disseminate the archive and, at the same time, increase it through citizen participation.

It was the merchant Claudio Carrillo who found the negatives in the trash some 25 years ago. He saw that they were closing a historic studio in front of his gift shop, El Pensamiento, and some glass plates caught his attention. “I kept a few and also other six-by-four negatives,” he recalls. He kept everything until a year ago when he told a friend, an electrician and photography enthusiast, about the pieces. He hallucinated and took a pair as a gift. “They were of female figures, like the rest of the material. I set out to print them, but it required a lot of money,” explains Carlos Ponce, who dreamed of being able to give these women their first and last names. At the beginning of the year, an acquaintance told him about Documenta Ronda. She went to the Maestranza to present her idea to them. “When we saw the images it was a huge surprise,” says archivist Francisco Rosales, who points out that the negatives were perfectly stored and preserved.

Little by little, data has been recovered to find out the origin of the photographs, which always feature one or more women —in groups, at most, three or four— and exceptionally some children. They are all between 70 and 80 years old and it is believed that in some cases their protagonists are family “because of the position they have and their similar features,” explains Rosales, who believes that these documents “are very special.” They are still under analysis, but at first glance it can be seen, for example, that the clothing worn by one and the other seems to indicate the economic capacity of the women. There are jewels that are repeated and, it is believed, this is because they were part of the props of the studio where they were taken, like the backgrounds or the clothes. “The framing, which in many shows only the bust and the face, works like a sociology catalogue”, highlights the photographer Daniel Pérez.

Citizen participation

The authorship of this singular who is who is not one hundred percent confirmed, but everything points to the fact that they were taken by Miguel Martín, who ran one of the few existing photographic studios in the town in the forties and who was right in front of the establishment of Claudio Carillo in Carrera Espinel, Ronda’s main shopping street. Martín was part of a saga of portrait artists who, little by little, moved from painting to photography. “The former was accessible only to wealthy families, because it was expensive work. The second, not so much”, affirms Rosales, who highlights Martín as one of the people who best documented Ronda during the last century. There are photos of Antonio Ordóñez and Ernest Hemingway along with other bullfighters that are still sold in shops in the center of the municipality to tourists. But there are also images of the Goyesque bullfight, of the surrounding landscapes or of everyday life. In addition, he made a series dedicated to urbanism that allows us to know how the streets of Ronda have changed over the years. Some have nothing to do with the current ones.

The Real Maestranza de Caballería has proposed to continue with Ponce’s idea and remove from anonymity the women who star in this collection of portraits that works almost as a closed project. The first step has been to digitize the negatives. The second will be to ask for citizen collaboration to try to identify the protagonists. They will do so through the most popular channel: social networks. In March they launched the Documenta Ronda group on Facebook, with which, precisely, this initiative was born within the framework of the 450th anniversary. There they are uploading their own archive —formed by several thousand photographs— and they also invite the people of Ronda to upload theirs so that, together, they can expand the institution’s collection and treat these graphic documents with professional criteria, which will be posted available to researchers. “The theme is very varied: popular events, delivery of diplomas, a soccer team. Sometimes we have information, other times we don’t. The neighbors are indicating if they remember who the characters are and from there we pull the thread to complete the documentation, ”explains Miguel Ángel Sánchez, who is in charge of the networks.

“The initiative has had an important calling effect. We wanted to take the archive out into the street and we have succeeded,” adds Ignacio Herrera, director of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda, who believes that the collection of women’s photographs will be the star of future publications and trusts that they will be his own. descendants and relatives who can name each of the portrayed. The images will be part of the end of the fiesta of the first edition of Documenta Ronda on July 13, an event that is expected to be repeated every two years. The monumental bullring will then host the broadcast of a video on a 45-square-meter screen where some of the organization’s most emotional and interesting collections will be included, both those that were already part of the archive and those that have been arriving over the years. last few months thanks to citizen collaboration.