Seeping into every scene - the photos of Koldo Chamorro

Almost every one of Koldo Chamorro's photos in this exhibition includes a brace of crucifixes, a trio, more. The exhibition is called O Santo Cristo Ibérico (The Holy Christ of the Miracles in Iberia) and the photos come from Chamorro's twenty-six-year documentation of religious practice in Spain and Portugal.
 
Chamorro sticks to his brief: as well as crucifixes, from handheld to full-size, we get tunics, pilgrims, churches, hearses, bell towers, priests. Religion is present and potent but the everyday or the incidental seeps into every scene. While one figure is absorbed in their devotional practice another figure is looking on, spectating, or is thinking about something else entirely, like the executioner's horse does in W H Auden's poem Musée des Beaux Arts.

Take the photo titled Navarra (undated): it shows a track in front of a rural building. In the midground a smiling man in a cap and work gloves leans on a low wall. A cement mixer beside him suggests it's only a pause in his work. 

In the foreground is a younger man, a teenager perhaps. He's dressed in a long black hooded garment and absorbed in carrying a heavy wooden crucifix. He stares back over his left shoulder, out of the image, as it were. Following a few paces behind, half cropped by the edge of the photo, is a third man, wearing a shirt and carrying his jacket gathered over one arm. He is trying to scratch his cheek with the hand in which he also holds an umbrella.

The act of carrying the crucifix fills the foreground. And the three strong linear elements - crucifix, umbrella, telegraph pole - create a focal point at the centre of the image. Yet this doesn’t exclude the other registers of life. Folded into the space of religious intensity is the man scratching his face, the man enjoying an idle moment before setting to again. This coexistence of three separate ways of being is also shown by their gaze - each figure in the photo is looking in a different direction. The divergence in their attention diffuses the energy, opens out the moment.

Line of sight leads the viewer into these photos and back out again. In Utrere (Seville, 1982) a religious parade is passing beneath a window. A plaster Jesus is receiving the perennial brutality from the plaster Romans. His bladed halo has a visual echo in the fan shape of the broken venetian blind at the window. The woman at the window, however, sees none of this: she is craning her neck and looking up above, perhaps to see the upstairs neighbours also at their window. Whatever it is, it takes her out of the religious moment.

In Lumbier (Navarra, 1988) a child is lying full length on a domestic wooden table. The table is on a scrubby slope overlooking a stone crucifix and high above the town and the valley. Perhaps the child is resting during a Santo Cristo parade, or is staring at the sky.

In a photo from the Stations of the Cross series, six women dressed all in black stand in front of a rugged stone wall. They wear black veils and headdresses and each holds a tall candle. It is sombre until you see the friendly smile of one and her gaze straight at the camera. In Orreaga/Roncesvalles (Navarra, 1979) a group of pilgrims in their black tunics have stopped in a wood. They're sitting on their crucifixes, chatting as they eat their sandwiches.

What Chamorro shows us is not religion but something else - he shows the way that these religious practices fit into daily life, are both intense and unremarkable. Religious practice is ever-present and always melting away, transforming into something familiar, into somewhere to rest your legs.