José Ortiz Echagüe

Ortiz Echagüe taking photos in Avila

José Ortiz Echagüe (born August 2, 1886 in Guadalajara , † September 7, 1980 in Madrid ) was a Spanish engineer, pilot, photographer and entrepreneur who came from a family of military. Under Alfonso XIII he was also royal chamberlain . He is the founder of the CASA aircraft factory and the Spanish automobile factory SEAT .

Life

José Ortiz Echagüe was born the third child of the military engineer Antonio Ortiz and his wife Dolores Echagüe. The couple had two daughters and five sons, one of whom died young as a military candidate. At the time of Jose's birth, his father was a professor at the Academy of Military Engineers in Guadalajara. When the father was appointed head of the military garrison in Logroño , the capital of the La Rioja region, three years later , the family moved to Logroño, where Jose grew up and went to school. He considered himself a "riojano". His brother Antonio, who was three years older than him, was determined to be a painter, although there were several military men in the father's and mother's families, but no well-known artists. Antonio was therefore sent to Paris and over the years became an internationally known portrait painter. An entire hall is dedicated to his works in the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián , where his parents lived after his father retired. José also wanted to become a painter, but his father's finances did not allow him to send a second son to Paris. However, an uncle who was a military attaché in Paris gave José a Kodak camera with which he took his first photos at the age of 12 and began to develop his artistic talent. In 1903 he took a photo in La Rioja during the sermon in a village church ("Sermón en la aldea"), for which he received first prize at an exhibition in Vitoria the following year . As early as 1904, the Spanish photo magazine Graphos Ilustrado published a report on his photos.

In 1911 he acquired the balloon driver's license and received the third pilot license issued in Spain up to that point .

In 1913 he tried to fly from Paris to Madrid on a Morane-Saulnier . When the plane caught fire, Ortiz Echagüe was able to save himself and the intact engine, which he brought to Morocco and - in the middle of a military operation - used to assemble a new aircraft. This was the beginning of his activity as an aircraft manufacturer.

In 1914 he was the first to fly over the Strait of Gibraltar - together with Captain Herrera .

In 1916 he married Carmen Rubio in Madrid. The marriage had eight children, three of whom are still alive today.

In 1923 he founded the CASA aircraft factory in Seville

In 1959, at the age of 72, he flew as a co-pilot with an F-100 Saber of the United States Air Force , which - like all US fighter jets in Europe at the time - had been repaired by the CASA. Back then, he was the oldest person to fly at supersonic speed .

The architect and Roman Catholic priest César Ortiz-Echagüe (* 1927) is his son.

Working as an engineer and entrepreneur

As an engineer, his work in aircraft construction and automobile manufacture is particularly noteworthy.
In 1903 Ortiz Echagüe had entered the Academy of Military Engineers in Guadalajara and after graduating had served in a captive balloon department in the Spanish-Moroccan War . Upon his return from Africa he founded in 1923 the aircraft factory CASA (under license from Bucker , Dornier , Heinkel , Junkers , now a partner in the construction of the Airbus and part of the EADS -Konzerns) and 1950 the first Spanish company to assembly line production of passenger cars, SEAT , as its He was chairman of the board until 1976. He was then appointed Honorary Chairman for Life at SEAT. SEAT has been part of the VW Group since 1986 .

Working as a photographer

In the field of artistic photography, Ortiz Echagüe is one of the most famous and popular photographers in Spain, who also enjoyed an excellent reputation abroad. In 1935 the magazine "American Photography" listed him among the three best photographers in the world. This is all the more astonishing as he was a pure “amateur” who could only pursue his favorite pastime in his spare time and while traveling.

Ortiz Echagüe was on the one hand convinced that the Spain of his time had to modernize, u. a. by founding industrial companies, on the other hand, was also aware that broad modernization could result in the disappearance of traditional clothing, a change in the villages and even a redesign of the landscape. He wanted to at least capture this cultural heritage on camera before the change occurred.

With regard to his artistic orientation, his training and his subject matter, one could assign him to the "Generation 98" of photography. He was also listed as the best representative of the so-called "Spanish Pictorialism ", although Ortiz Echagüe rejected this designation. His photography focused on working out the basic currents of the character of an ethnic group or a village: its customs, clothing and location. Ortiz achieved a personal expression with his photographs that comes close to that of a painting; He achieved this through special processing during the creation of the positive print. Both the production of the photosensitive paper and the creation of the positives required a lot of patience, great skill and precise knowledge of the technology used.

Ortiz Echagüe in the home laboratory

technology

The Fresson paper used by Ortiz Echagüe had a thin gelatin layer that contained a black pigment and was made photosensitive by chemicals. The photographer made contact prints on this paper . The gelatin remained soft in the less exposed areas and became harder in the more exposed areas. The contact sheet was then washed with a mixture of water and sawdust. The gelatin which had remained soft was removed as a result and light areas resulted. The hardened gelatin withstood this wash and dark areas remained. The still moist positive contact sheet was then processed with the help of brushes, cotton swabs or scrapers, leaving the artist plenty of room for creative freedom.

The reasons for using this technique by Ortiz Echagüe were: the increased possibility of influencing the result of a photograph; the greater abundance of degrees of pigmentation; Finally, the improved shelf life of the product. However, the use of this archaic technique was by no means the most important thing in his photographs. Without an interesting object, without a good composition, without skilful lighting and without a suitable structure of the scenery, working with the paper “Fresson” only gave mediocre results.

Cameras

Ortiz's first camera took 6 plates in the format 8 × 6.6 cm.
His second camera, which a relative gave him three years later and which he used for five years, was a "Photo Esphère" for glass plates measuring 9 × 12 cm.
In the years 1903–1909 he used a 9 × 12 cm folding camera and a 15 × 18 cm travel camera with a wooden tripod.
He took photos of traditional costumes with a 13 × 18 cm travel camera with a Hermagis Eidoscope lens with a focal length of 26 cm ( light intensity 5).
From 1934 he used a 9 × 12 cm reflex camera with several lenses with focal lengths of 13 to 45 cm, especially for landscape photography.
In his last 20 years (until 1970) he used a Linhof Technika and a Graflex Speed ​​Graphic, which was very popular with press photographers in the USA at the time .

Classification of his photographic work

Ortiz Echagüe himself divided his work into four volumes: Spain - Characters and Clothes (1930); Spain - Villages and Landscapes (1939); Mystical Spain (1943); and Spain - Castles and Palaces (1956). More than 200,000 copies of these large-format illustrated books have been sold. Mention should also be Morocco and family scenes .

• Spanish society looks at characters and clothing from a folkloric perspective, along with portraits of great human depth.

• In Spain - Villages and Landscapes , it is about the contrast between country and village, beyond the representation of buildings and landscapes.

• Mystical Spain focuses on monastic communities and on popular religious life in the form of processions and pilgrimages. The portraits of the monks are reminiscent of works by Zurbarán or El Greco .

• Spain - Castles and Palaces can be seen as an extended continuation of Spain - Villages and Landscapes . There are only a few privately owned copies of this edition left.

In addition to the photographs published in the aforementioned volumes, Ortiz Echagüe created an interesting series about Morocco. Most of it was developed while working as a military engineer in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco . The rest was recorded in what was then French Morocco in 1960 .

Unpublished as a book, but of great artistic interest is the family scenes series , which includes individual portraits and group pictures.

Most of his photographic work is now kept in the Legado Ortiz Echagüe at the University of Navarra (Pamplona, ​​Spain). This discount includes about a thousand originals after by himself as "carbondir" designated carbon Fresson - coal process and more than 20,000 negatives. The Museum of Clothing in Madrid acquired a significant part of the photographs associated with characters and clothing in 1933 .

Anthological exhibition

In 1929 an exhibition of his photographs took place in Berlin. Then his book Spanish Heads - Pictures from Castile, Aragon and Andalusia was published .

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized an anthological exhibition entitled Spectacular Spain in 1960 , in which Ortiz Echagüe appeared alongside Goya . Eighty photographs by Ortiz Echagüe were shown in this exhibition.

The University of Navarra created an anthological exhibition on Ortiz Echagüe in 1998 , which was based on the above exhibition in New York. It covered a period of sixty productive years until 1964. Since 1998, this exhibition has been on view in various locations, including the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya , the Hôtel de Sully in Paris, the Sala de Armas of the Ciudadela de Pamplona , in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (over 150,000 visitors), in the Palacio del Infantado of Guadalajara, in the Sala Amós Salvador in Logroño.

literature

• Ortiz Echagüe . Editores-La Fábrica, Madrid 1998, ISBN 84-95183-00-5 (catalog of the anthological exhibition)
• Jose Ortiz-Echagüe: Spain. Landscapes and Portraits 1903–1964 . [Trans. from d. Chip. by Susanne Felkau]. Schirmer / Mosel Verlag , Munich 1979, ISBN 3-921375-36-3
• Asunción Domeño: Ortiz Echagüe, notario de la tradiciön . Editores-La Fábrica, Madrid 2005, ISBN 84-96466-02-7
• Asunción Domeño: La fotografia de Jose Ortiz Echagüe: tecnica, estetica y temätica . Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Educaciön y Cultura, Pamplona 2000, ISBN 84-235-2042-0
• Carmen Erro Gasca: El empresario fotógrafo . Comunicación Airbus Military, EADS CASA, Madrid 2012, ISBN 978-84-616-1910-8
• Javier Ortiz-Echagüe: NORTE DE ÁFRICA, Ortiz Echagüe . Editores-La Fábrica, Madrid 2013, ISBN 978-84-8043-259-7 (catalog of the exhibition in the Museu Nacional D'Art de Catalunya)

Web links

• Legado Ortiz Echagüe (Universidad de Navarra)
• Website about Jose Ortiz Echagüe in the Centro Virtual Cervantes
• Asunción Domeño Martínez de Morentin: La fotografia de José Ortiz Echagüe en el País Vasco y Navarra (span.)
• About José Ortiz-Echagüe (Airbus-Military)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ José Antonio Vidal-Quadras: Ortiz-Echagüe y Navarra (PDF; 1.9 MB). Príncipe de Viana , Volume 54, No. 198, 1993, pp. 51-71
2. ↑ Airbus Military History ( Memento of the original from December 23, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English)  
3. ↑ Ysabel de la Rosa: Time Traveler: José Ortiz Echagüe ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Apogee Photo Magazine; undated 
4. ^ Jose Ortiz-Echagüe: Spain. Landscapes and Portraits 1903–1964. Schirmer / Mosel Verlag , Munich 1979
5. ↑ Muerte de José Ortiz-Echagüe, pionero de la fotografía artística en España , El País , September 12, 1980
6. ↑ Fondo fotográfico Universidad de Navarra: Legado Ortiz-Echagüe ( Memento of the original from December 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , 2005 
7. ↑ José Ortiz Echagüe: Spanish Heads - Pictures from Castile, Aragon and Andalusia. Ernst Wasmuth Verlag , Tübingen - Berlin, 1929.