La sofisticación artística y el espejo de la miseria: la colección Palabra e Imagen de Lumen como vehículo de memoria.

The collection of books Palabra e Imagen from Lumen, which began in 1961, undoubtedly represents one of the major achievements of Spanish publishing in recent decades, not only for its exquisite and unique design, but also because the best Spanish narrators and photographers from the sixties took part in it. Today these books are expensive, almost luxury goods, and hard to find. In 2004, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid organized an exhibition of Spanish Photobooks from the 20th century, modeled to a large extent on books from this collection. Since then, these volumes have lost their primary function of being read and have become instead relics of Spanish cultural heritage. These photos are cultural products that can be considered as objects of memory that reveal, through their humanist documentary style, a reality of misery absent from the official rhetoric of the Franco regime. From a memory perspective, these photos attract attention nowadays as a collective snapshot that assaults our senses and that requires the new generation to acknowledge a debt from the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]