W. Eugene Smith - Spanish Village 1951- Life Magazine

An ancient method of spinning flax yarn

W. Eugene Smith was an America photo journalist working for Life magazine. He came to to the Extremadura village of Deleitosa in 1951 and spent some time there recording the daily life of the village. These images are extraordinary, they show a life that seemingly had not changed in its gruelling poverty for hundreds of years. The faces of the people are sculpted down to the bone by hard work and little to eat. Such was Franco's rural Spain in Extremadura. The image of the the three Guardia Civil seems to portray the very hard and cruel truth of keeping order, fascist order that is. And how well they succeeded and for how long, no wonder it took Spain such a long time to launch itself into the 20th century as these images testify.

Guardia Civil wearing their ridiculous patent leather hats

Another, seemingly less important, but telling level of fascist dictatorship was fashion dictatorship. My mother told me how she was stopped by the Guardia Civil in Madrid while travelling between
England and Portugal in the late 1950s, She was wearing some lovely black linen capri pants, the latest thing every where else but the sight of her parading around in these was definitely NOT ACCEPTABLE !! She was given a stern lecture and sent off to change into something ........something more FASCIST.

 

 

Grain flying as women winnow the wheat on the eira

Deleitosa is not in Las Hurdes the scene of Buñuel's documentary film 'Las Hurdes-Tierra sin Pan'
 ( The Hurdes- Land without Bread) which was made in 1933, it became an iconic and, being Buñuel, controversial style of documentary, by the way demonstrating the dire poverty of rural Extremadura. Las hurdes still bears this stigma and is not happy about it but these images show that any village in Extremadura was suffering the same fate and nothing had improved in the 20 years separating the two projects. 'Tierra sin Pan' was banned from showing in Spain for several year. I wonder why? Fortunately it was beyond Franco's powers to stop foreign journalistic reports. Bravo Eugene!