The foot that writes

Pilgrims of Hope

Pilgrims of Hope is the third exhibition in the series “The Foot That Writes” (Pamplona 2023, Tudela 2024), a living project carried out in Pamplona and Guernica that seeks to photograph the intangible—the soul and the aura—through portraits of pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. Inspired by Avedon’s Midwest work, the technique used is cross-disciplinary, merging interviews, documentary work, and ultimately, photography. These different disciplines come together in a work of art, elevating the status of the subject being portrayed.

The entire process serves the search for truth—through a gaze, a grimace, a gesture. It unites the artist’s restlessness, the philosophy of the Camino, and the connection that even the most skeptical individuals might attribute to a technique designed to disarm the subject. For those familiar with the texts and bibliography of the project, it is simply the space that the artist provides as a receiver of a truth incubated along the journey. Now, in the presence of light—which is the artist—they can contemplate it without fear. And that same light (φῶς “phos”) serves to capture it (γράφω “graphos”). In fact, some “interviews” (the artist is often asked if he is a psychologist or a priest, making it fair to describe them as therapy sessions, spiritual direction, or consultations) can last four or five hours, or even several days.

The Camino de Santiago is both universal and unique—not just a Spanish or European tradition, but a global one, transcending eras and encompassing all ages, all socioeconomic backgrounds, and all nationalities. Each of those people, those hundreds of thousands of citizens of the world, experiences the journey differently. Despite differences in ethnicity, age, or individual circumstances, we are all pilgrims, and there are things that unite us. There is no better metaphor for life than a path—and it is a path we all walk. Perhaps alone, but always accompanied. Along the way, there are always people who live, have lived, or will live through similar experiences, similar tragedies, similar joys. This all takes place within a unique context of purpose and spirituality—one that no one denies. There are truths revealed in the distance, in the landscape, within each person, and in the presence of fellow travelers or strangers who share a stretch of the journey.

It is within this spirit that the Episcopal Conference of Toledo has invited Patricio SJ to exhibit his work as part of the program for the Jubilee Year 2025. The theme, announced by Pope Francis, is “Pilgrims of Hope”, inviting the Church to reflect on hope as a gift from God—one that drives us to walk toward a better future and build a more just and fraternal world. It is that very hope that lingers along the Camino, in the artist’s vision, and in the eyes of the pilgrim.

Photogeny in Motion

Patricio Sánchez Jáuregui has set out on the Camino and has given it the multicultural human face that best defines it. Or rather, he has given it its complex photogeny. There are different definitions of the term photogeny, but they all take for granted that this concept relates to the visual synthesis of a person's life through their portrait. This entails the challenge of representing in a flat and static image the essence of a three-dimensional face—a body—that is naturally dynamic and psychologically alive.

Each and every one of the people portrayed by Patricio, posing against that improvised anonymous white backdrop, is in motion, psychologically alive. They reveal so much that they seem to demand a full story of their life, beyond the static photograph. In fact, the earliest theorists of cinema as an art form placed photogeny at the center of discussions about aura or the "inner truth"* of filmed people and objects. Similarly, the most influential theories on photographic imagery accept as an axiom that photogeny is not an exclusive property of reality, nor is it simply an effect of the optical device, nor the result of a photographer’s trick. Rather, it arises from a necessary three-way alliance between the model, the camera, and the photographer. When that effect of latent life appears in an image, it is experienced as a miracle or a magical event.

A magical event is what each of the portraits selected by Patricio for display in Toledo represents, inviting us to imagine exotic lives—distant from us—yet brought closer within the warm, moving home that is the Camino de Santiago. In the spontaneity and confidence of their pose, we come to know them, thanks to Patricio Sánchez Jáuregui’s photogenic talent, in such an intimate way that we feel they will stay with us forever. And at the same time, we know this is not the case—that they are merely passing through, as is this exhibition.

As Joan Fontcuberta states (in The Pandora Camera, p. 14), although it is not possible to scientifically study what makes something photogenic (as one might study the picturesque or the sublime in the arts), "we insist that the human face is the mirror of the soul, the place that is at once the most intimate and the most external to the subject, the screen on which their psychological interiority merges with the coercions imposed by public life. The face is, at the same time, the site of revelation and simulation, of indiscretion and concealment, of spontaneity and deception—in other words, of everything that allows for the configuration of identity."

This wonderful exhibition (from the Latin mirabilia, meaning something that provokes feelings of wonder or admiration—emotions that, according to Aristotle, mark the beginning of philosophy), with photographs of faces both beautiful and simultaneously distant and close, astonishes us while also inviting reflection on photogeny in motion: that complex personal and collective identity that shapes the Camino de Santiago.

JORGE LATORRE

Notes

*For example, Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein (as well as Dziga Vertov with his Kinopravda) suggested in the early 1920s that the camera possessed an almost magical power of transformation—a capacity to condense an ephemeral intensity that, once revealed, was destined to shine for a few moments before fading away. Thus, the theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein (1891–1953) defined photogeny as "Any aspect of things, beings, and souls that enhances their moral quality through cinematic reproduction." With this definition of photogeny, Epstein sought to highlight cinema’s separation from other art forms and to emphasize its distance from literature and theater, underscoring movement—the most characteristic feature of cinema, whose Greek name implies dynamism, an image in motion—as the fundamental trait of photogeny: "It is the image as revalued through movement." However, other directors, such as Luis Buñuel, saw D. W. Griffith as the father of photogenic art, through his use of the close-up and its connection to the portrayal of acting characters.