A renovated Diario Madrid Foundation presents an exhibition with 172 stories in as many snapshots of a city that never lost its charm and vitality

That Madrid brings to light the best of the photographic archive of the newspaper that dynamited the dictatorship

The roar that produced the explosion and the reduction to rubble and ashes of the newspaper Madrid destroyed a means of information, but it could not silence the illusions and yearning for freedom of its young journalists, who managed to save their dignity and the immense wealth of their memory and their stories. Also, its photographic archive, more than 160,000 snapshots from both the Heraldo and the Madrid newspaper itself. 

The exhibition, installed in the renovated headquarters of the Diario Madrid Foundation, consists of 172 snapshots, which in reality are 172 stories told in an instant, in a still image captured by the photographer's astuteness. It was Francisco Umbral who said that, in reality, Madrid is an excuse to tell stories, and that is the aim of this exhibition, which covers one of the most intense periods in the history of the city (1921-1971). 

expo fundacion diario

Everything is politics, but professional politicians do not appear in this exhibition. The protagonism is ceded to the people of Madrid, whether born or adopted, because it is well known that in Madrid no one is a stranger. It is therefore easy to conclude that being a Madrileño is not due to place of birth but to the desire to integrate, so that, as Calderón de la Barca said, "Madrid is the homeland of all, for in its small world, Spaniards and foreigners are children of equal affection". 

Madrid is places, but it is also attitudes, and that Madrid is bustle, it is party, it is street, it is the evening stroll and the botijos a la fresca, it is the nocturnal conversation and the desperate traffic (of quadrupeds first, and motorised vehicles later), it is the markets, the queues in the metro and the attempts to turn the banks of the "apprentice river" that is the Manzanares into a beach. That Madrid is piecework and siesta, it is early mornings and festivals, it is routine and commotion, it is enjoyment. De Madrid al Cielo may have been an apt slogan, but there must be a lot of truth in it when those who come and settle there corroborate and proclaim it. 

Díaz Casariego, Pérez de Rozas, Luque, Anguita, Basabe, Cervera, Urech or Wagner sign, among others, the snapshots, in which older visitors will recognise moments from their own lives. Others, the younger ones, will perhaps get to know for the first time the street, the square or the corner they live in today, which is nothing like what it was and which the photographs show them. 

expo fundacion diario

Others will evoke in spurts the history of their own family, like the snapshot showing hundreds of suitcases arranged in the Estación del Norte, whose owners were already on the emigration train, in search of the opportunities and horizons that post-war Spain could not offer them. It is precisely this silent snapshot, but undoubtedly full of memories, tears and nostalgia, to which Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency, Relations with Parliament and Democratic Memory, referred at the opening of the exhibition. The minister evoked the story of his own emigrant parents, who met and fell in love in the strange land of another country. 

Fifty years after the dictatorship decreed the closure of the Madrid newspaper, this exhibition and the setting in which it is housed offer something more than a museum exhibition. It is history, it is life, it is experience and it is, in short, the link between generations that pass the baton to show that that Madrid, so traditional, dynamic and vital, was in reality the necessary prelude to the great Madrid of our times. 
 

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