Toni Vidal - Menorca tot just ahir…

1st edition published by Triangle, 2003
Format: Hardback with dustjacket, 250x270mm
Pages: 260
Condition: Very Good

In the 1960s, Toni Vidal first saw the signs of a Minorca that had started to undergo a social and economic transformation. The balance between the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, known as the Minorcan road to development, soon ceased to be a reality. The assignments that Toni Vidal was asked to take on were in many cases new buildings designed for the growing tourist industry. So he turned his camera to a Minorca in danger of disappearing, to which little attention was paid. The landscapes and forms of life in that old Minorca were gradually replaced by a Minorca that began to exploit tourism under the motto «Blue and white island». This is how Toni Vidal started out along the path to photography understood as a document… and as an art. Although his first impulse was to leave a record of all he saw, the sensitivity he used to capture light, characters and objects have given his work a first rate artistic quality. Today, Minorca, Gas Maó, Men/Women/Work and La España Industrial are extraordinary examples of how to give new meanings to visual reality, through an absolute mastery of the contrast of light and shadow and impossible blacks and whites. Beyond the nostalgia or melancholy of that bygone Minorca or those first jobs, the author proposes a different gaze, by transforming it. As Roland Barthes said in the book Camera lucida: 'Photography only takes on its full value with the irreversible disappearance of the reference, the death of the photographed subject or the passing of time.'