The image of Spain during the 19th century cannot be conceived without the figure of the British photographer Charles Clifford (1819–1863), a pioneer in using photography as a novel instrument for the international projection of the image of our country. He belongs to the generation of the first professional photographers who used the calotype as a tool for research and the projection of new themes and forms of expression. All of them, passionate about the expressive possibilities offered by the new photographic technology, opened new paths to connect it closely with the modernization efforts that marked the present, as well as with that cult of the past that nourished nationalist discourses, masterfully expressed in the graphic inventory of its monumental heritage.

Behind the apparent continuity and stylistic unity manifested in his work, one can detect many technological mutations driven by the adoption of new cameras, new sensitive supports, and personal developing procedures, just as numerous changes occur in his photographic subjects of interest. Interested in everything happening in Spain, but also conditioned by the varied nature of the commissions he had to accept in order to survive, disparate subjects coexist in his work. And they coexist with a great degree of harmony, as if they all formed part of the same photographic discourse aimed at showing Spaniards the values of their own country and astonishing European spectators with the singularity of that world extending beyond the Pyrenees, half in the East and half in the West, straddling between a picturesque past and modernity.

Nevertheless, his photographic production is thematically very coherent, as it focuses on the entity and evolution of Spain’s monumental heritage, which concentrates his attention and guides the thematic selection he makes in his Monumental album of Spain, the project that this exhibition highlights.

Clifford began his career in photography around 1850, ending it abruptly with his death in January 1863. During just over a decade of activity, he evolved technically from the daguerreotype to the calotype and, from 1855 onward, to the collodion negative and the albumen paper positive. At the same time, he abandoned portrait work early on, turning toward the documentation of urban and monumental landscapes, and diversified his clientele and channels of dissemination as he expanded and consolidated his subjects, taking on very diverse commissions from academics, architects, engineers, and the Spanish, French, and British nobility and royal families. For many of them, he created monographic albums, and thanks to the thematic opportunities provided by these commissions, as well as by the images he captured on his own initiative, he generated a vast archive of images of Spain. Part of this archive was published in two editorial ventures — Scramble through Spain and the Monumental album of Spain — which brought his work to the attention of all Europe and made him an essential reference for the image of Spain.