Before his adolescence, Jürgen Schadeberg (Berlin, 1931 – La Drova, 2020) had already belonged to the Hitler youth by obligation and helped to resistance to fascism by delivering secret messages with his bicycle. Then he survived, along with his mother, the bombs of the allies about Berlin. Then life was sought in Hamburg. And with 19 years he made the leap to South Africa, where he developed a long, exceptional and prolific professional career as a photojournalist. Portrayed as few the apartheid With his Leica for the mythical magazine Drum and later promoted numerous photography publications on those years. Author of mythical portraits to activists such as Nelson Mandela or artists such as Miriam Makeba, in his incredible biography there is a surprising note. Between 1969 and 1971 he lived in Los Boliches, a tiny town of the Costa del Sol. And from where he diving for local life to approach traditions such as the Verdiales or British drunken tourism.
The Málaga yearspublished book this spring for Alix Books, collects more than a hundred photographs of the work that Schadeberg made during his stay on the Malaga coast. It is a practically personal project – and funded – by the cultural manager Juanjo Fuentes, whose frantic activity allows him to direct the magazine Staf Magazine for 30 years and the growing Moments festival. He ran into the work of German photojournalist thanks to the chance and Leica’s team. Then he contacted his widow, Claudia Schadeberg. And with his support, three years ago he began to shape a work that has just seen the light in a careful edition of 500 copies that includes numerous unpublished prints. “When you think of that time, you always imagine the postcard or family images of the beach or birthdays. But this is different: it is day to day, the ordinary people, the street,” says Fuentes.
In his memoirs – attacked As I see it And published in Spanish by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, which appointed him aspooris cause in 2014 – Schadeberg remembers that after spending more than a decade in his first stage in South Africa, he had been in London for another five years, where he gave photography classes and continued to exercise freelance For publications such as Die Time. In 1969, fed up with the British rain, he read a report on Torremolinos where the visits of the Hollywood stars were related in the fifties and the posterior tourist burst with the all -inclusive packages for British. “After all about all that, I decided to investigate what was happening on the Costa del Sol, so I left London and its cold atmosphere and went to Spain to take a look at that area,” the German wrote. When he landed, he hallucinated with the little original charm that was already left on the coast, but also the characters that swarmed for that sunny territory, especially for some who offered “great opportunities to photographers.”
He settled in the bowling and dedicated himself to photographing the day to day. Soon he also started working for the magazine Look outthen published by Ken Brown, whose orders were the perfect excuse to approach some local traditions such as Holy Week or live a bullfight in the teacher of Ronda, although he especially paid attention to something very Malaga: the Verdiales. This music – indispensable part of local folklore – and the elements around him were key in Schaderberg’s work. “These are the photographs that caught my attention,” says Fuentes. They are full of life, of joy. They show the happiness of simple people. And the power of the reunion from shared roots that, since then, have not changed too much.
The Verdiales and the working class
Those were also the images-which now can also be seen, until mid-July, at the La Malagueta Cultural Center-that most surprised Rogelio López-Cuenca, an artist who signs one of the five texts that includes The Málaga years. “I’ve enjoyed this book very much,” he says. “Especially because it does not imply a nostalgic look. It is a point of view of the foreigner, which looks at everyday things that were invisible for us, of course. But it also focused a lot on the workers, who have always been ignored in the tourist iconography,” adds López Cuenca, who continues: “In South Africa it portrayed the living conditions of a major They put the table, served in the bars or made the beds. ” There are distributors, fishermen and even Gogós in the discos. A work that also is related to which Jerome Liebling and Joel Meyerowitz did just three years before also in Malaga.
The time they portrayed has already disappeared. He did it shortly after and it was the cause that Schaderberg did not reside again in the area. “In the early 2000s we went to visit the Costa del Sol and everything had changed dramatically,” recalls Claudia Schaderberg. After a stage in South Africa, another in Berlin and later south of France, the couple decided to move to Spain and tested with Malaga, but what they found made them flee. “Everything had changed so much that terrified us,” he emphasizes. They ended in the drug, near Gandía (Valencia), a town where they lived for several years – and published together Portrait of a Spanish people– Until the death of the photojournalist in summer of 2020. Today she maintains there a huge archive of negatives from which this book has come out. “His main work was in South Africa, of course. Apartheid and everything he did there is fundamental, but it is also incredible to see other works as beautiful and little known as this,” says the woman.