1
The first thing I did upon receiving the commission to write part of the text accompanying this virtual exhibition of photographs of the cities of Gävle and Girona taken between 1880 and 1914 was to look for Gävle on a map.
The second thing I did was to learn how to pronounce the name of this Swedish city correctly.
And the third thing was to make a virtue of necessity. In other words, to continue cultivating my complete ignorance of Gävle, and hence nourish the hallucinatory idea that an almost complete ignorance of this city would endow me with more intense powers of invention than would be the case if I knew more about it.

2
Although it was still winter, there was a spring sun that day. The specialists at the Centre for Image Research and Diffusion at Girona City Council had presented me with the series of photographs of the cities of Gävle and Girona. They had been grouped together in the eleven blocks that visitors to the exhibition can now see: The City, Industry, Shops, Markets, Transport, Trades, Traditions and Celebrations, Sport, Education, Family and Religion.
I took advantage of that brief spate of good weather to hang the photographs on my garden fence, helped by my daughters. As we carefully attached them to the fence I listened intently to their comments.
One of them confused the two cities and said, "It used to snow a lot in Girona and people had to travel on sledges" (0108-13092_red).

From their imaginative spiral, not yet conditioned by the restrictive logic of grown ups, I wrote down some of their other comments:

-"How did the people of Gävle climb onto the roof if they kept the ladder up there?" (0910_12047_red)

-"This is where Nanook the Eskimo lived"

-"Look: a load of shoes is about to fall down" (0309-11225_red)

-"This couple decided that their children would have their dad's ears and their mum's eyes" (1009-13184_red)

-"Dad, do people in Gävle die in the same way as those in Girona?"
-"Of course they do."
-"But in exactly, exactly the same way?"
-"I don't know…"
(1110-894) (1105-GIR_69)

-"The girl in the first row, the one who is apart from the rest, looks like a doll. Dad, don't you think that this girl must be dead by now?" (0903-GIR_115.16-1670)

The word dead stirred up a gust of wind in the garden. It wasn't the north wind. It was a warm breeze that advanced in short bursts, and was very pleasant after the cold winter we had had. The wind rustled the photographs, causing some to come unstuck. They danced on the breeze. While my daughters chased the capricious flights of the photographs, laughing, I delighted in that random poetry: in front of us swirled faces, buildings, landscapes, houses, two cities in the whirligig of chance. We managed to catch them all. We reordered the photographs, becoming ever more aware of a discovery: the portentous similarity between Gävle and Girona, between these two forms of human volubility.

3
Under the ruddy twilight sky I once again compared the photographs of Gävle and Girona. I looked at the faces of the people, of those dead people that are our dead people. In Timaeus, Plato describes time as "a mobile image of eternity". Yes: in the curve of time, all movement tends to solidify, just like the sea, which seen from afar seems to be not quite liquid, but rather made of a viscose substance, lumpy, almost solid. Everything goes back to one, to a crystallizing unit. Plato's archetypes, Jung's collective unconscious, Spinoza's pantheism or the concept of will developed by Schopenhauer are all theories expressing how humans resemble each other in an inevitable way. We are united by our limbic system, our instincts, our attributes and our insignificance. It would be unreasonable to think that the people of Gävle have not loved, killed, lived, died, stolen, worked and suffered just as we have.
On the garden table I had these forms of human life contained in the frozen movement of the photograph. They give you two spaces and one time. You breathe a world. Through words you speculate on the laws that might govern us. You order and reorder the photographs as if they were a pack of cards. And you discover that organizing the chaosmos is like the juggler's faith, a project akin to writing the biography of the whole world.
In the evening, when the wind has died down and calm has come to the whole world, you think: in Gävle, a writer named exactly the same as me must, right now, be writing the exact same text, these exact same words. It is not mere coincidence. It is necessary plagiarism, inner predestination for our recurring human attributes.

4
In the bottom left-hand corner of this photograph (0903-GIR_115.16-1670) there is a girl that resembles a doll. She is leaning against the backrest of the seat of a desk. She has a penetrating look that is at the same time languid, which is about to be extinguished by the closing of her eyes; this denotes tiredness or the anticipation of the resigned sadness of adulthood. The position of her arms insinuates that she is nervously interlocking her little fingers behind her back. What grabs our attention and draws it to the centre of this photograph of a group of schoolchildren is that this girl is sitting slightly apart from the rest of her classmates. This is significant filling of the empty space, which makes it difficult not to conceive of the photograph as palmistry: signs and powers of life stored like a premonition. To a certain extent looking at this girl is like being aware of our essential nakedness as helpless creatures caught up in the fierce whirlwind of life.

5
Only one schoolgirl (0908_6429_red) in this photograph, the one who is sitting on the left-hand side of the second row, has not followed the instructions to look straight ahead at the photographer and the camera. The teacher cannot now tell her off since he is also looking in the same direction as the girl.

Photography has the ability to immortalize these off-centre moments, take note of those conceptual suspensions, point to the order of the fleeting and negligence, remark definitively on those tiny inclinations that complete our essential way of being in the world..
It is likely that the girl's parents, when they saw the photograph for the first time, reprimanded her for not paying attention, without pausing to consider that the deviation of her look could be beneficial, since often the side views in life tend to be more decisive and nuanced than when one looks straight ahead. It is a photograph that announces what is out of view, everything that is not entrapped by the image. It is a photograph that offers an indication of what it does not include, and hence induces vertigo, the cry of nothingness: the weight of the imaginative recreation of all the regions of the cosmos and all the human forms that have never been photographed.

6
The girls in these two photographs (0903-GIR_115.16-1670) (0908_6429_red) allow us to categorically assert the existence of inner and displaced worlds.

After so much photographed, filmed, recorded and written history, after such saturated memory, we will long to immerse ourselves in photography in the same way that Alice in Wonderland entered the topsy-turvy world: through the looking glass, piercing the film of dreams, making inventories of strange combinations, like that which brings together all those things that did not exist and all those things that were impossible.

7
This selection of photographs of the cities of Girona and Gävle shows a social and historical frieze. They are photographs, as we have already mentioned, spanning a specific period, running from 1880 to 1914. The first date is foundational. It signifies the industrialization of the photograph, the emergence of the gelatine silver process, which substituted the wet collodium process. The gelatine silver process allowed negatives to be ready for capturing images, reducing exposure time considerably and hence promoting the emergence of instant photography. Negative plates were made in factories, which resulted in photography changing from an artisan phenomenon to an industrial one
The photographer Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) linked this expansion of photography with the economic, social and political rise of the middle class, since the portrait, understood also as a rubric for the individual and the family or guild clan, starts to be within the means of this then emerging social group.

It is very likely that the brewery workers that appear in this photograph (1-10048_red) are aware of bequeathing a unique document to historical memory. This is what we are led to believe by their poses, the studied calculation of all the details of a scenic composition taken to such lengths that it even expresses-through the bundles and pieces scattered on the street-a highly ordered disorder. In this case it was surely of the utmost importance for them to project the most dignified image of themselves possible.

8
(0101-28, 0102-Reg16886, 0103-Reg3016, 0105-Reg1316) Panoramic photographs of Girona: the Mercadal wall, the riverbank of the Onyar, Carrer del Carme, Plaça Marquès de Camps... They are spots I often go past. The question is: does the photograph help or substitute memory?

9
Love, sex, destruction, the telegraph, the printing press, the telephone, cybernetics, the alphabet, fire, penicillin, the death of God, libraries, the calendar, conversation, the compass, the word goodbye, lies, toothache or photographs are such powerful phenomena that they immediately lose all subordinate status. And even if they had arisen as instruments or reinforcements of some other factor, they soon become the measure of all other things. The same thing happened with the devices that recorded time. Thus, the water clock, the sundial, the atomic clock or the digital watch not only measure time but organize it, and organize it by separating temporality and events, spreading the illusion of a reality reduced to mathematical sequences that are not linked to private human experience
The photograph not only strengthens our memory, but also, strictly speaking, creates it. This is related to the ductile and ever elusive nature of memory. Henry Bergson speaks about a fluent and layered memory, so that each memory would update the previous one. According to this logic, pain may possibly be the memory of pain, love the memory of love, and so on for all a person's impressions. They are shadow puppets that sometimes have earned majestic descriptions: science, vision, truth or theology.
To the extent that photography does not only reflect reality but renews and alters it, these images of the Mercadal and Girona Cathedral districts (0101-28) or the dignified poverty that imbues the wooden houses in the southern part of Gävle (0110-7044_red), are not our memories of the cities, but the impassioned reconstruction of our cities.

Part of the past, as this exhibition shows, does not arise from Memory, but rather the memory of photographic memory. It is a nuance, an incision that allows us to delve in and rediscover that we have the same attributes as mirrors:

mirrors,
silent voices,
blind of touch,
shared kisses in sealed solitude,
simulacrum of another simulacrum.

10
Walter Benjamin said that "the difference between magic and technology is entirely a historical variable". Let us pause at the edge of this delicate abyss. And we do so recalling Chesterton, who wrote that "nothing is as natural as magic". And we do so recalling Wittgenstein, who remarked that "it is always a mistake to try to explain magic scientifically".
Browsing images from this period, when the art of photography begins to settle on technical reproducibility, we must not fall into that arrogant habit so typical of the contemporary view, which consists of contemplating the past from the perspective of the present time with an air of superiority, as if our ancestors had lived their lives trapped in an adolescent mindset or in a mythological and superstitious stage, still predating the bright culmination of Reason, which-oh happy chance-happens to coincide with our times, our present and our fortunate selves.
Walter Benjamin, like so many other anti-academicists, asserts the importance of magic, a rational magic. He states that the long exposure required by the procedures of early photography, prior to the emergence of the gelatine silver procedure, meant that the portrayed models lived "inside the photograph". Benjamin believed that the technical reproducibility of art made the photograph lose the original aura and mythical authenticity of its artisan origins. It was, according to him, a commercialization that separates the work from its magical distance.
It is a very powerful idea, one that regards early photographs not as an incident, but a universe governed by its own laws.

11
When I look at these photographs 0603-Reg2228) (0606_10399_red, 0610_10368_red) I think of the photographer Karl Dauthendey (1819-1896), who confessed the fears that had overcome them as they looked at the first daguerreotypes in history: "At first we dared not look closely at the first images. We were afraid of the sharpness of the figures and thought their tiny faces could see us."

It is clear that it is a two-way path. These photographs observe us and address us.

12
In our times, photography has become an obvious, inevitable phenomenon. Most people carry cameras with them, a phenomenon even more ubiquitous with the universal spread of the mobile phone. And, if necessary, few people demur from stepping aside somewhat from the intense experience of a moment in time in exchange for a photograph of that moment. Maybe it is what is known as horror vacui. We are terrified of emptiness and oblivion. In this sense, photography is a balm for our fears, since it accentuates our faith in existence, in the proof of existence, in the proof of our own existence.
The strange poses of the people that appear in these photographs of Girona market (0403-Reg3071, 0404-Reg1260) and the family group in Gävle (1009-13184_red) show us people that, unlike us, were not accustomed to the everyday nature of photography.

What were these people thinking while they were having their photograph taken? We must remember that they instituted immortality as an attribute of photography. And that most probably meant confronting a set of new, mysterious and unknown forces. This digression is not an artificial lucubration. On the contrary, it is an inherent part of the picture.
Plotinus, a philosopher of the third century AD, refused to have a bust of his face sculpted. He alleged that, according to the Platonic order of the universe he professed, his sculpted face would have been a third degradation: a copy of a bad copy of the archetype of the World of Ideas. In the late nineteenth century the newspaper Der Leipziger Anzeiger cursed photography, arguing that this French invention was akin to blasphemy since God had made man in His image and likeness, and therefore nobody could compete with divine omnipotence in creating a mortal image. Some factions of Islam forbid photography for the same reason: because they consider it arrogant in its desire to imitate the creative power of God. Rarely have I felt such an intense mixture of indignation and grief as when, on a trip to southern China, some women, wracked with anxiety, begged a travel companion to hand over the film from the camera from which he had photographed them shamelessly and treacherously. The guide informed us that the women believed that in photographing them "he had stolen part of their soul".

In these contemporary times we no longer talk of the soul. We talk of consciousness. The photograph outlines a space of consciousness. This is shown by the shelves and glittering objects in the Gelabert shop (0301-GIR_2-L263-15); by the studied negligent pose of the bookseller in the Geli bookshop (0302-GIR_23-A3-0225, 0303-GIR_23-A3-0227) and also by the photographs of Gävle classified under the heading Shops (0306-887_red, 0307-1018_red, 0308-1025_red, 0309-11225_red, 0310-7589_red). In these cases photography is used to produce an image of a tidy world, a universe based on order.

The same thing happens with all the pictures dealing with the transport network of our two cities, this time bolstered by straight-forward natural reason: transportation trusts in a rational world order, a premise essential for connecting two distant places, point A and point B. It is the same with the photographs related to trades, the family and education: on the one hand, industrious zeal and knowledge presuppose a positive transformation of the world, while on the other the idea of family means the pretence of a matriarchal order, the order of all orders. The imperative of conscience of these photographs celebrates the idea of a reality that is symmetrical, regular, transformed, evolving and eventually dominated.
This heightened awareness makes these groups of photographs to some extent supplant reality, even raising the illusion of a truth replaced by the image. On the other hand the most tumultuous photographs in this exhibition, the ones that are less staged and more casual, such as those in the Markets section and some of the ones in the Traditions and Celebrations, exude a promiscuous spontaneity, which is surely one of the most honest expressions of humanity. I think it is precisely in these two groups of photographs that there is less distance between the hopes and fears on the faces looking at us and the hopes and fears on our faces looking at them. The motley crowd of people and livestock, as well as the small-scale fairground shows, connect us with the essence of the human condition: the rigour of survival and escape that play and fiction allow us.

13
What have words got to do with a virtual exhibition of photographs like this? During the transition from the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Lumière Galaxy the superstition arose that "a picture is worth a thousand words".
The alleged superiority and independence of the image in relation to the word is a lie that has established itself with remarkable success. But it is an inconsistent idea. The proof is that neither the series of photographs of these two cities, nor possibly any other intelligent diagnosis, can be complete without the word. The cataracts of images are more suitable for inducing emotional flooding and upheavals of a sensitive nature than reasoning. The faces, frames and landscapes of the photographs of Gävle and Girona are raw material for evocation. But without the word, these photographs would not even exist: they would be mere objects, indistinguishable among other objects, like a sublime symphony written on a forgotten stave, lost and buried in the mud.
We see only what we understand. Without any rational linguistic construction, there could hardly be understanding. We live in a culture that is subjugated by language. There are cultural manifestations in which the image may predominate over the word. In Hinduism, for example, when the faithful come to the temple to see the image of God, and thus, through direct contemplation (darsaan), hope to evoke the most sublime religious experience. But in cultural manifestations arising from the great monotheistic religions-Christianity, Judaism and Islam-language not only encodes reality, but also allows it. The biblical fact is clear: "In the beginning was the Word". God gives the nominative faculty to the creatures he created. Muslims see the Koran not only as an instrument of the manifestation of Allah, but an attribute. The Kabbalah, in its exaggerated fashion, diagnoses the separation between words and things, between the perfect language of divinity and the deficiencies of subsequent human language, so bastardized.
All this is may be certain. But it does not hide the ambivalence of language, which is an instrument that can also announce its own paralysis. In the faces of these photographs there is a power that remains on the other side of the mirror, of the dream.

14
Bertolt Brecht denounces the functional nature of representation and affirms that photographs of workers and factories "tell us little about workers and factories".
Do the photographs of workers at the Gròber factory in Girona (0201-Reg1506)and workers at the gas and electricity company in Gävle (0208-13306_red), tell us anything about the workers in either city? In any case, all they can say (or hide) is no longer the exclusive province of the image, but of the word. (We should note that Brecht, in this example of an anti-example, corrects the deficiency precisely through the word, a critical word that attempts to restore the truth). If, as Roland Barthes writes in L'obvie et l'obtus, essais critiques, photography is the writing of the visible, it would be very difficult to understand our respective cities without these graphic documents. The concentration of these images allows us to recognize their evolution. The markets, religious ceremonies, school photographs or views of the city of Girona will have moved more than one present-day inhabitant, as these same topics must make a deep impression on the citizens of Gävle. It is the surprise of recognizing oneself, understanding that your history involves all other histories, that your place in the world is also the result of the slightest motion of other particles. But let us not forget that this whole digression is part of the realm of the word. The word speaks of photography.
The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, in his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography, examines the transition from a written culture to a culture dominated by images. With the predominance of photography, film, television and the Internet, there is a cultural paradigm shift, comparable to that which took place with the advent of printing. Flusser emphasizes how photography in particular, and visual culture in general, conveys a "deceptive appearance of objectivity". The equation is formulated in a very intelligible fashion: "It is not the world that is real, but the photograph of the world". Flusser points out that the photograph is always dependent on interpretation, on verbal interpretation, of course. He says: "the camera obscura hides a codification." It is here that the word completes the image. It is here that the word allows us to construct the image. It is here that the word allows us to see the image. It is here that the workers begin to speak to us.

15
These photographs of Gävle and Girona are true fictions. Mario Vargas Llosa defines fiction as "a subtle palliative" to overcome the gap between "our limited reality and our excessive appetites". So from this perspective, arriving at the truth through the lie of fiction is the compensatory formula for restoring order.
Diametrically opposed to this magnification of fiction is James G. Ballard, an English writer born in China. Ballard defends the exhaustive nature of the documentary genre in the context of a culture saturated by fiction. He sees the documentary, the objective story, countering, with the accuracy of a mirror, a reality distorted by imaginative inflation.
These two approaches by Vargas Llosa and Ballard are expressed in the two poles of the story: fiction and documentaries.
In its early stages, photography was considered a minor genre, because it merely reproduced reality. Over the years reality became saturated by fiction and hyperfiction. This led to a new vitalizing power of photography: its documentary nature, its complete subjection to an essential paramount reality, completely exposed.
What do these considerations bring to this series of photographs of Gävle and Girona? Completeness. And, above all, awareness, an awareness that the past is much more malleable and variable than the future, so uncontrollable, so diffuse, so pliable with predictions that become self-fulfilling.
Photography, these photographs of Gävle and Girona, makes a reasonable fiction possible, based on the documentary. There is no Truth or Memory in capital letters. We are resigned to work on the small print: the rationed fiction of a memory that continually renews the past. And this process will last until we ourselves, the current spectators, are also part of the past. That is, until we have become the subject of a retrospective that explores "the virtual exhibition that took place in 2012 of photographs from the cities of Girona and Gävle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".
This idea of anticipating the future leads to arrhythmia: to understand that pioneers will also grow old, that museums can also be museum exhibits, that this exhibition on the passage of time will also, of course, be consumed by the passage of time.