This series of photographs taken at the Sunday car boot sale on Malaga´s esplanade is a continuation of the theme evoked in my previous blog entry. The conscious decision to present these photos in black and white is in honour of the street photography tradition, and following in the footsteps of such greats as the photographers of the Magnum agency, Robert Capa, Eliott Erwit and, of course, Henry Cartier-Bresson. Indeed, the very subject of this photo report calls for such treatment.
Black and white photography is a genre of its own, capturing the genuine essence of a photograph. The technical disadvantage of not allowing colour to be captured in the shot has educated the eye of many a generation of photographers, teaching them to read reality in a scale of tones from black to white in such way that, rather than showing the expected (and oft-discussed) relationship between photography and visual reality, infuses instead an aura of objectivity that appears somehow more intense than with colour photographs.
The following pictures portray the business lives of the of the people who come every Sunday to the same spot to sell things that could easily be found in the garbage: old computers, telephones, long play records, mixed with second-hand shoes or a stuffed wild boar´s head.. The work of loading and downloading all this junk combined with the ridiculously low prices of the goods, cause one to imagine that the goal behind setting the stands up every week is more about the wish to socialize than to make money. But of course, every case is a different story.
