Printing the ‘People’: Populism,Photography,and the Spanish Republican Nation (1931–1936)

Abstract

The very first Article of the 1931 Spanish constitution declared ‘Spain is a democratic republic of workers of all classes’ and that ‘The powers of all its organs derive from the People’. But who were those workers, those People? This populist nationalism was key in legitimizing the Second Spanish Republic and in many of its political and cultural projects, but the state did not develop a clear image of the people. This should come as no surprise, since the ‘People’ was a contested concept in the 1930s, appropriated by different political parties and groups. How were Spaniards supposed to visualize themselves then? Who embodied the Spanish nation in the 1930s, and how was it represented? In this article, I show how different social actors – the state, photographers, the illustrated press – developed varying images of the ‘People’, focused either on the rural population or urban dwellers, who were supposed to play an important role in defining the new Republican nation. These photographic representations offer a window on to the complexities of the intersection between nationalism, populism, and social and political conflict in 1930s Spain, and how the nation was built through printed culture.