The strictest reality as an artistic subject. This is what Clemente Bernad, a photographer and documentary maker from Pamplona who has become the protagonist of the images that depict the social and political conflicts that have marked Southern Europe in recent years. Come and see them in an exhibition curated by Carles Guerra and entitled in Basque and Catalan: ‘Hemendik hurbil / Close Enough’. At La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, from 26 October to 26 January.

Clemente Bernad was born in 1963 in the Basque Country, but he studied Fine Arts in photography, cinema and video at the University of Barcelona, as well as sociology at the Public University of Navarre. Fruit of these passions, photography and sociology, are the images that we can see in the exhibition, focused on the Basque conflict. They are the creations of an artist who might seem like a photojournalist were it not for the fact that his images are rarely seen in newspapers and periodicals. He brings them, instead, in self-financed publications and in exhibitions marked by a documentary approach.

At La Virreina Centre de la Imatge we can see photographs taken between 1987 and 2018 (in the image: Hernani, 1996), taken in the place and at the moment in which the violence is manifested, so that we can connect the images. The first was taken in Pamplona and the second in Kanbo (Cambo-les-Bains), evoking the Arnaga Declaration, in May 2018, which marked the dissolution of ETA.

Between the first and the last photograph in the exhibition, a timeline that gives no hint of what is to come, the resolution of a conflict that has marked the Basque Country and which, as the images show, combines violence of different kinds.

This mixture of images and violence, without an explicit stance on what is shown by the author, proposes a critical reading of the photojournalistic narrative, distinguishing it from the real evolution of the events, in a stance that, for many, makes him a kind of anti-photojournalist.

If you want to see how Clemente Bernard makes documentary art with the images he has taken of one of the great conflicts in Southern Europe, come and see ‘Hemendik hurbil / Close Enough’ at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, but first you can find all the information about it on the website.