27/06/2014

Dr. Peig, Curator of Photography Exhibition on Santa Maria de Ripoll Monastery

Dr. Concepció Peig, a professor in the UIC Faculty of Humanities, is one of the curators of the exhibition «Photographs from 1867 of Santa Maria de Ripoll Monastery», which can be visited in the Abad Senjust room in the Ripoll town hall. The archive is an important contribution to understanding Ripoll's historical buildings and for the history of photography.

The exhibition was inaugurated on Friday, 19 April 2013, and can be visited until Monday, 13 May 2013. It includes photographs from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (RABASF), the Regional Archives in Ripoll (ACRI) and the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia in Girona (DIAG), as well as from the Plana Berga family's personal collection in Barcelona.

The exhibition is made up of a series of 30 photographs taken in 1867 during a visit from delegates sent by the Provincial Monuments Commission of Girona. The archive is an important contribution to understanding Ripoll's historical buildings and for the history of photography, as there are not many monuments that can boast such a large number of photographs from such a long time ago.

The existence of the photographs taken in Ripoll was made known through references in Josep Maria Pellicer i Pagès' books Santa Maria de Ripoll (1878) and Santa María Del Monasterio de Ripoll (1888), but the whereabouts of the photographs were unknown. In 2004, while carrying out research at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Dr. Concepció Peig, a professor in the UIC Faculty of Humanities, found 25 photographs together with written notes explaining what they were.

As though her finding were not enough, new photographs in the series were also discovered in the Regional Archives in Ripoll (ACRI), the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia in Girona (DIAG) and the Plana Berga family's personal collection in Barcelona. A total of 30 photographs were found, with 67 copies in all.

At the same time, the photographs of Ripoll from 1867 gave new importance to the work of Josep Boadas Baguer, a previously virtually unknown photographer from Girona who now has a prominent place in the history of Catalan photography thanks to this assignment.

The discovery and examination of the photographs from 1867 have also revealed the photographer and origin of the image of a drawing on the Romanesque façade of Ripoll. It had originally been exhibited in the provincial museum of San Pedro de Galligans in Girona, but then went missing.

In 2013, the photographs of Ripoll Monastery from 1867 will be published in the book Santa Maria de Ripoll en el Segle XIX: El Procés d’una Transformació. El Llegat Joan Martí Font, funded by the Fundació Eduard Soler and written by Dr. Concepció Peig, Antoni Llagostera and Antoni Pladevall.