Singing is forbidden,

prohibido el cante, this was written in several suburban pubs in the Franco era. And this is the title of the exhibition which the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo of Seville dedicated in 2009 to the forbidden song, the flamenco.

The exhibition presented in more than two hundred pictures how the anonymous photographers and the big names saw the flamenco from the 19th century, the discovery of the exotic South, through the great masters of the 20th century to today’s sophisticated fashion photographers. I have not seen the catalog, only those seventeen images which have just been published from it by one-way. By searching on the Spanish web I have found quite a few more pictures of it, but these only showed how brilliantly one-way picked out those seventeen which, by leaving out every exotism and anecdotism, convey the power of the dance, the humanity of the artists, and how unimaginably this dance increases them. This selection is a work of art in itself. I also publish it without any change or addition.


Pedro and Inés Bacán: Nana. From the CD De viva voz, 1995

Antoñita La Singla, Barcelona, 1962 (Xavier Miserachs)

Jerez-de-la-Frontera, 1989

Gypsy dancer, 1956

Mario Maya, 1983 (Guilles Larrain)

Granada, 1950

Man Ray, 1934

Castagnets – Antonio y Rosita Segovia (Juan Gyenes), 1960s

1957

Habana, 1995

El Farruco and Carmen Segura, Sevilla, 1983 (Guilles Larrain)

In the fair of Seville, 1967

Farruco and Farruquito, 1964 (David George)

Anatolia, 1964

Barcelona, 1955

Paris, 1963

Joaquín Cortés, 1995