Sensuality and commitment A labour of love

Above all, the pho­tog­ra­phy of Leopoldo Pomés sug­gests sen­su­al­ity. That is why pub­lic­ity, al­ways ap­peal­ing to the con­sumer sub­con­scious, be­came fer­tile ground for Pomés. He is a pho­tog­ra­pher who cap­tures the aroma of the 1960s, the decade of Blow Up, of Michelan­gelo An­to­nioni and, lo­cally, of the Gauche Di­vine. But Pomés is more than a pub­li­cist, as he showed in 2012 when the Fun­dació Foto Colecta­nia pub­lished his splen­did im­ages of Barcelona 1957. Pomés is the re­sult of the high qual­ity at­tained by pho­tog­ra­phy in Cat­alo­nia in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tury.

It all began in 1947 with an enig­matic pho­to­graph taken in the port of Barcelona. It all came to an end last year, with a ten­der por­trait of the three founders of the MBM ar­chi­tects' stu­dio, the trio of Mar­torell, Bo­hi­gas and Mackay –who passed away soon after. How­ever, in end­ing, things ap­pear to have only just begun for pho­tog­ra­pher Leopoldo Pomés (Barcelona, 1931), who has spent a life­time cap­tur­ing the mys­ter­ies of beauty with his cam­era. Life and cre­ation are key words in the ca­reer of the pho­tog­ra­pher and pub­li­cist who claims he could not have achieved even half of what he has with­out love. This pas­sion can clearly be seen in the Pomés works on dis­play in the Pe­dr­era. The ex­hi­bi­tion, Leopoldo Pomés. Flash­back, runs until July 12.

In 1947, Pomés was merely a young man with an un­cer­tain pro­fes­sional fu­ture. A ter­ri­ble stu­dent, his first real in­tel­lec­tual stim­u­la­tion came from con­tact with the young artists of the Dau al Set group. They passed on the avant-garde virus to the young Pomés and be­came friends into the bar­gain. He took pho­tographs of them and they gave him works as gifts –beau­ti­ful ob­jects that can be seen in the ex­hi­bi­tion. Thus an en­dur­ing as­so­ci­a­tion was forged that lasted many years. When Pomés de­cided to try out bowl­ing, he asked Tàpies to de­sign a sheet for the re­sults. He al­most died laugh­ing at Brossa when he sang La del manojo de rosas. And he lit­er­ally rolled up into a ball on the ground when Ponç pre­tended that his body was de­com­pos­ing: First his nose ap­peared, then the ears, now his chest and his tes­ti­cle, which he in­flated and then pre­tended to ex­plode with a nee­dle,” re­called a laugh­ing Pomés at the open­ing of the ex­hi­bi­tion.

How­ever, the ex­hi­bi­tion does not begin with this gallery of por­traits of the Dau al Set. The first room con­tains two pho­tographs that rep­re­sent in­flu­ences on him that pre-dated his as­so­ci­a­tion with the artis­tic group. One is a por­trait of his fa­ther, his main source of sup­port after the pre­ma­ture death of his mother. The other is a por­trait of the bar­ber who cut his hair when he was a child: “He was fas­ci­nated by his ec­cen­tric­i­ties. And this at­trac­tion for any­thing sin­gu­lar, out­side the norm, forged his way of un­der­stand­ing pho­tog­ra­phy,” says the ex­hi­bi­tion's cu­ra­tor, Julià Guil­la­mon.

How­ever, if there is one pho­to­graph among the 140 on dis­play in La Pe­dr­era, most of which have never been seen be­fore, that can be called foun­da­tional for the pho­tog­ra­pher it is the image he took in 1953 of Núria, an un­at­tain­able love, a mar­ried woman who ended up mov­ing to Amer­ica with her hus­band. Pomés ded­i­cated poems to her while this pho­to­graph with its cre­pus­cu­lar air proved to be rev­e­la­tory for him: “I saw that I had made some­thing and a world of per­sonal cre­ation opened up for me,” he says.

Once again it is love that made the dif­fer­ence. It was with Karin Leiz, who be­came his wife and his right hand in every­thing, that he took the most de­ci­sive step in his life.

“We were mys­te­ri­ous and I de­cided to try my hand at pub­lic­ity,” he says. No one had much faith in him but his first cam­paign - a swim­ming cos­tume for women from the Meyba com­pany - ended up as a great suc­cess. “Every­thing came from here.” And every­thing means every­thing. Pomés be­came the great pub­li­cist of his era be­cause he brought a never-be­fore-seen moder­nity with in­no­v­a­tive and orig­i­nal ideas. The Pomés style left its mark on the 1960s and 70s. It was a dis­crete style “el­e­gant, so­phis­ti­cated, em­pa­thetic”: “The emo­tional fac­tor is the key to un­der­stand­ing how he worked. None of his mod­els is an anony­mous fig­ure,” says Guil­la­mon.

Each image is born out of a fleet­ing mo­ment of love. This was true even when he combed Spain in search of the women to play the bub­bles in the Christ­mas Freix­enet ads: “ What did Karin ask from the girls? Ah, yes, that they should know how to dance and have a good fig­ure. Noth­ing else.”