Marcel Giró

Palmira Puig, at last a properly revealed photographer

El Punt Avui.
Maria Palau. 12-2-26

It would be worth asking whether there are precedents of a museum that, newly inaugurated, has devoted its first monographic exhibition to a woman artist—and not to an established one, but to someone completely unknown until recently. Doing so requires courage, because the museum world is more comfortable within the mainstream loop. It also requires an extra degree of rigor, one that would probably not be demanded of any exhibition devoted to a male artist, for fear of hearing that “it’s not such a big deal.” In the case of the photographer Palmira Puig (Tàrrega, 1912–Barcelona, 1979), it very much is—and there will be no doubt about it thanks to the retrospective organized by the Morera in Lleida, a museum aptly described by a renowned art critic as “a jewel box.” The chocolates were already there; what was missing was the box that could preserve and present them seductively—in other words, a proper building, finally inaugurated in the summer of 2024.

Forget the archaeologists who work with brushes to carefully unearth the vestiges of the past. To bring Palmira Puig’s work to light, an excavator was needed—one that exhumed some sixty photographs from the entrails of time. Few, yes, but just enough to mark out the milestones of a personal creative territory. The process has been slow and driven by three people: Toni Ricart Giró, Palmira Puig’s nephew and custodian of a highly complex archive long entirely associated with another photographer—this one well known—her husband, Marcel Giró (Badalona, 1913–Sant Cugat del Vallès, 2011); the gallerist Rocío Santa Cruz, who first presented her work in 2018 in her Barcelona space; and Jesús Navarro, director of the Morera, who quickly knocked on the doors of public institutions when the MoMA in New York and the Tate Gallery in London began acquiring vintage prints by that secret Catalan photographer. Navarro secured the acquisition of thirteen photographs—seven period prints and six contemporary prints—first by the Provincial Council of Lleida and later by the Generalitat.

A superficial exhibition, like so many others, would have limited itself to displaying those sixty photographs with a few symbolic wall labels. But at the Morera, the two curators, Navarro and Santa Cruz, of Revealed Perspectives (until February 15; the show will close, but a wonderful catalogue will remain), have gone to the root of things. And at the very beginning, we do not find a young woman apparently concerned with photography, but rather with fashion and sport. The pre–Civil War Palmira Puig was committed to the ideals of the Republic and served as secretary of the Women’s Group of the Republican Union of Tàrrega. She had absorbed those values at home, in an illustrious and progressive family. The 1936 coup d’état did not intimidate her. Records of her activism remain in the archives, where she appears as a clerk for the Local Board of Passive Defense of Barcelona, an institution created by Lluís Companys to safeguard the population from fascist bombings.

Franco’s victory had devastating consequences for the Puig family. They saw the books from their library thrown out of the window and their properties confiscated. Palmira’s love was also far away. Marcel Giró went into exile in 1937, weary of disputes within the Republican camp. Having settled in Colombia, they reunited in 1943 as husband and wife. Francoist laws did not allow a woman to travel alone unless married, and Palmira had to celebrate the ceremony by proxy, with him absent. A photograph preserved in the family album shows her looking at a portrait of Marcel on their wedding day.

Another coup d’état, this time in Colombia in 1946, would once again shake their lives. Their new destination was Brazil. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, this seems to have been the moment when Palmira the photographer was born. We do not know when she first picked up a camera, but we do know that São Paulo’s cultural atmosphere encouraged her to take that step. It was an environment shaped by a wave of photographers who modernized the discipline amid the architectural, economic, and artistic renewal of a city that Claude Lévi-Strauss had described as the “incipient Chicago of the Southern Hemisphere.”

In 1950, Marcel Giró joined the association leading these new photographic practices, the Foto Clube Bandeirante. Palmira entered six years later—no small achievement, given the club’s minimal female presence. The Morera exhibition includes works by several of its members, not only to evoke the creative effervescence in which the Giró Puig couple took part, but also to highlight Palmira’s distinctive style.

Her individuality becomes clear when her images are placed alongside her husband’s. Here we reach the core of the archival confusions inherited by her nephew. The couple, deeply in sync, often photographed the same subjects—but not in the same way or with the same intention. In São Paulo, Palmira shifted her camera toward those excluded from the urban and industrial progress that so fascinated the Foto Clube Bandeirante, rendering visible—and showing compassion for—the persistent poverty of the favelas. And in Ibiza, in 1953, during one of the first times the couple returned to Spanish territory (a journey they would later repeat annually to visit family), Palmira produced a brilliant reportage reaffirming her poetic and humanist language. Where Marcel posed his subjects, she discreetly preferred to capture the natural flow of everyday life. Almost no one looks directly at the lens.

1953 was also the year they decided to professionalize and opened Estúdio Giró, which would become one of Brazil’s most important advertising photography studios. Those who worked there are clear: they were a tandem, and it is unfair to describe Palmira as merely an assistant. Yet she seems to have devoted herself body and soul to the business, abandoning her experimental work. Why did she not continue it in the 1960s and 1970s, especially after stimuli such as exhibiting in 1959 at the Société Française de Photographie et de Cinématographie? Beyond the Giró Archive, might more of her work still lie hidden in unknown collections? “There is ground yet to cover,” says Jesús Navarro. In other words, further research will surely bring surprises.

In 1978 she was diagnosed with cancer. She and her husband decided to return permanently to Catalonia. A year later, she died in Barcelona at the age of 67. Marcel never picked up a camera again and sought refuge from his grief in painting.

El Punt Avui