{"id":7523,"date":"2026-04-30T09:53:02","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T09:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/?p=7523"},"modified":"2026-05-05T06:44:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T06:44:47","slug":"argo16-the-storeroom-street-box-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/argo16-the-storeroom-street-box-photography\/","title":{"rendered":"Once upon a time there was a little boat…"},"content":{"rendered":"

To S\u00edlvia, the sailing instructor<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h4>\n

Playing with photography<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Far from committing suicide, Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) devised a sophisticated revenge against those who had not supported his photographic procedure and he tricked them into believing that they had caused his death. Bayard carefully staged the scene and portrayed himself as a drowning, thus beginning the trend of using photography to lie and play tricks.<\/p>\n

This type of game was played more by amateur photographers than by those who worked in the medium professionally, simply because they had free time to “waste” and did not need to spend day after day taking portraits of clients to earn a living. Of couse, those games often included the sea and ships.<\/p>\n

Julia Margaret Cameron<\/strong><\/h4>\n

One of the first people to photograph people in boats was a highly cultured British woman with time, money, and friends (as well as people in her service) who were willing to play roles. Using her camera, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) illustrated scenes from the poems of her friend and neighbour Alfred Tennyson, one of the most popular poets in Victorian England. Cameron first arranged and then photographed episodes from the Arthurian legends: the wounded king in a boat leaving Camelot (figure 1) or Elaine lying in another boat approaching the castle (1875). In neither case are these \u2018real\u2019 boats and, of course, the people are not out at sea, but rather inside a glass gallery \u2014the photographer’s former greenhouse in the garden of Dimbola, her residence on the Isle of Wight\u2014 the gabled roof of which can be seen in the photographs.<\/p>\n

\"(Figure
(Figure 1) Julia Margaret Cameron, The Passing of King Arthur, 1875. V&A<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cameron worked with cameras, optics and techniques that did not allow her to freeze movement. She used negatives on glass plates with wet collodion; from these, she made contact prints on albumen paper. The exposure time was about 10-12 seconds in good light, which was not always common in London or the Isle of Wight. All this means that if someone or something moved while the shutter was open, the result would be blurred on the negative, thus ruining the photograph. That’s why Cameron managed to use fabrics in the two photographs that gave the impression that the water is in motion, rising up the side of the boat. It was not the only fiction, since the moon is not “real” either. It was still impossible to take photographs at night, especially involving a group of people. That’s why the photographs were taken during the day, and the moonlight effect was obtained in the photo lab, by scratching the emulsion (collodion) on the negative, so that when it was turned into a positive print, the light would pass through that small arc and pretend to be our satellite.<\/p>\n

Having one’s portrait taken at the photographer’s house<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Professional portrait studios \u2014the galleries where the bourgeoisie went to have their portraits taken in the cities starting in the 1860s\u2014 were also a \u201cfactory of dreams\u201d before the cinema was invented. When taking a portrait, people did not only think about whether the image would be a faithful reproduction, or about having a souvenir to keep for years or to send to distant family and friends. It was also about obtaining an \u201cimproved\u201d representation of the person posing: in Sunday clothes, with well-combed hair and in a more \u201cnoble\u201d environment than that of everyday life; not at home or on the street, but in a palace hall, a garden or a boat. The latter was especially attractive to people who lived far from the coast and would never know the sea or to those who would never get on a boat despite living close to the sea. The photograph of two women in a studio in Elizondo (Navarra) around 1904 makes this clear (figure 2). Dressed to go out on a stroll, they both sit behind a piece of wood that imitates a boat with painted waves, and they hold the oars firmly, in front of a set that represents a river and the silhouette of a city in the background.<\/p>\n

\"(Figure
(Figure 2) F\u00e9lix Mena, Two women in a boat, Elizondo (Navarra), Pamplona. Photo: Museo de Navarra, ca. 1904.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 19th century, only a handful of people were able to have their portrait taken on a real boat, such as the family of the Duke of Osuna, who Clifford photographed on the manmade lake of Alameda in 1856. The portrait on the boat (in addition to being an extraordinary technical display) was as exotic as the camels that Clifford himself photographed there. In this case it was not just any family, but rather the family of a great Spanish nobleman. Nor was it just any group that thirty years later, in the spring of 1883, toured the Moroccan coast, from Tangier to Constantine, aboard the Vanad\u00eds, with Jacint Verdaguer accompanying the Marquis of Comillas, his wife and a group of friends (figure 3), or who toured the Mediterranean in 1897 aboard the Thistle<\/em>, taking photographs from the deck and photographing the yacht from the ports of Malta and Palermo. The owner of the Thistle<\/em> was the Countess of Valencia de Don Juan, and traveling with her were Eug\u00e9nie de Montijo, who had been Empress of France, and her niece, the Duchess of Alba.<\/p>\n

\"(Figure
(Figure 3) Amateur photographer. Passengers on board the yacht Vanadis. Photo album \u201cThe Vanadis\u201d. (1883). Unknown artist. AHCB. Jacint Verdaguer Santal\u00f3 Collection AHCB 5D67\/5-3 Inv. 50444.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For everyone \u2014aristocrats and the bourgeois alike\u2014 the use of photography took another step when the task became simplified: when cameras became cheaper, the handling of chemicals less cumbersome and the whole process easier; when the materials for taking photographs were bought ready-made in stores and the negatives were sent to be developed to the company that produced them. All this happened in the 1880s and grew at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th with the small Kodak cameras. At that time, amateurs had easier access to these photographic \u201cgames\u201d, which thus multiplied.<\/p>\n

Itinerant and street box photography<\/strong><\/h4>\n

As important as these changes were, they did not mean that anyone, anywhere, could have their portrait taken on a boat. This required photographers of modest means (both men and women), willing to travel from one end of the country to the other, carrying cameras, chemicals and a few props, to reach villages where there was no permanent photographer. These professionals made their appearance during the holidays, when people were getting new clothes, had some money to spend and wanted to have their photos taken.<\/p>\n

Most of them, like the photographer from Elizondo F\u00e9lix Mena (1861-1935), had a full time photography studio in the city and travelled to the towns. In addition, they often added other activities to portraiture: some sold tapes, others collected insurance payments and all brought news from one place to another. At first they rode horses, then bicycles, like Valent\u00ed Fargnoli (1885-1944), who travelled the province of Girona with a camera on his shoulder; later they would go there by motorbike, like \u00c1ngel Rom\u00e1n Allas (1927-2023), the itinerant photographer from Segovia. He was one of the “photographers without a gallery”, who did not have a studio and only worked on the street.<\/p>\n

These itinerant photographers followed a tradition that came about with the birth photography and grew in the early 20th century. Just as the leiqueros,<\/em> as the Leica-porting photographers were known, were on the main streets of big cities in the 1930s, many of these itinerant photographers took “photographs by the minute”, which is why they were known as minuters in Catalonia. A minute is a but of an exaggeration, but the name is very revealing: the photographs were developed and delivered quickly, shortly after they were taken.<\/p>\n

The street box camera has its origins in automatic cameras (pre-photomaton) that did not yield good results. They were manufactured in Barcelona by the Electra company, which at the end of the 19th century offered them “to photographers, amateurs and people who are dedicated to using novelties at fairs, festivals and markets”, and the model made by Enric Bargu\u00e9s (1883-1967), patented in 1917, “the one that made the photographer’s work the easiest and is the one that has survived to this day with practically no modification” (Reference: Salvador Ti\u00f3<\/em> ).<\/p>\n

However, most of the time, the photographers themselves built the street box cameras or commissioned a carpenter to do so. It is a large box that contains the camera itself and the laboratory with the trays for the developing and fixing liquids. After the shot, which was taken like with any other camera, the photographer to insert their hand into a side hole in the box equipped with a sleeve to develop the photo. This results in a negative on paper, which, once fixed, is placed on a frame in front of the camera and photographed again to repeat the operations inside the box and obtain a positive (a photograph), which is washed in a water tray, an inseparable companion of the minute cameras and which in some countries of Ibero-America is called ag\u00fcita photo.<\/p>\n

The most commonly used paper was postcard paper, which was purchased ready-made, and measured 13.7 \u00d7 8.8 cm, but it was not uncommon, especially in the post-war years, for it to be split in half, and the copies to be the size of half a card, 7 \u00d7 9 cm, or even sometimes a quarter.<\/p>\n

Photos were an opportunity for a party<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Since the entire process takes place in full view of the public and in broad daylight, taking a street box photo still involves much more than just getting a flattering image; it is a game and a new and fascinating experience. That’s why, considering how inexpensive it was and how it was everywhere, this type of photography continued to live on during the Spanish Civil War and had a great deal of success in the 1940s and 1950s, even when there was not much money to spend on superfluous things.<\/p>\n

To make photography more fun, traveling photographers carried small propos. The ones that involved movement and travel \u2014such as boats, balloons, cars, and airplanes\u2014 were especially popular. Sometimes these same props were used in the studio, like Elizondo’s gallery, or when the children went “fishing.” Until a few years ago, Roser Rafel (1923-2024), a photographer from Sort, had two painted curtains in her studio to stand in the middle of and take “flying” portraits (Figure 4).<\/p>\n

\"(Figure
(Figure 4) Decorative set by the photographer Roser Rafel, in Sort. Photo: Maria de los Santos Garcia-Felguera collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the first half of the 20th century, this type of photography was part of the fun of the festivities, as this list of attractions in Palma de Mallorca for the Palm Sunday festivities of 1920 makes clear: “There were […] stalls selling dates, churros, hazelnuts, sweets and other treats, kitchen utensils, painted porcelain ceramics, raffle stalls, easels, shooting galleries, photographers and a thousand other [places].”<\/p>\n

Thanks to the street box photography, what only a duke’s relatives could have in the 19th century \u2014a portrait on a boat\u2014 was within the reach of any family in the 20th century, including swans and even a classical temple. The boats came in many varieties: a simple rowboat, like the one of the women of Pamplona; mail steamers of the Compa\u00f1\u00eda Trasatl\u00e1ntica, like the Alfonso XIII<\/em> and the Reina Victoria Eugenia<\/em>, the latter in service between 1913 and 1934 and carrying a group of twelve people, or others, like the Rey Jaime I<\/em> (a passenger ship of the Isle\u00f1a Mar\u00edtima between 1911 and 1916) on board of which two women “save” a man who has fallen into the water without much conviction. There is no shortage of warships in the midst of battle, which, however surprising it may seem, were common at the end of the Spanish Civil War and the start of the Second World War. In a photograph from 1942, a group of young men\u2014quite cheerful, no doubt from drinking\u2014play on a warship, under a sky full of fighter planes, in Tossa de Mar during the feast of Saint Stephen.<\/p>\n

Since it was a job that was done on the street, the minuter photographers were mainly men, but there were also women, like Salvadora Forti\u00e0, married to Ricard Pla Maranges, who had a “photo by the minute” business in the gardens of La Devesa in Girona starting in 1933.<\/p>\n

The custom of taking these photos remained popular since the beginning of the 20th century, withstood the Spanish Civil War thanks to its cheap price, and had a resurgence in the 1940s (when it allowed the illusion of “a certain normality” amidst the anomaly of autarkic Spain) and lasted until the 1960s of the same century, when economic development brought Kodak Instamatic cameras to every home and to every social class, even to working women. From then on, domestic photography, with cameras that were easily loaded and taken to stores to be developed, and even come back in colour, gradually left these itinerant photographers out of work.<\/p>\n

Very few minuter photographers survived, but in recent years as photography has become intangible there has been a renewed interest in being able to touch photos again, to give them a physical body and hold them in your hand or store them somewhere other than the cloud. For this reason, just as collodions on glass and metal, albumen and salt papers, cyanotypes, negatives on paper, daguerreotypes and bromolis are being made again, there has also been a renaissance of street box photography. Today it’s not uncommon to find minuter photographers next to the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona or the Palau Maricel in Sitges.<\/p>\n

\"Anonymous
Anonymous photograph. Children fishing, Barcelona. Photo: MMB.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Street box photography and games<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[192],"class_list":["post-7523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-storeroom","tag-192"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7523"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7978,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7523\/revisions\/7978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}