You can interact with the objects and images you will find here, and find out more information about them.
Thousands of people were isolated, sometimes for life, in the hundreds of leprosy sanatoriums built around the world. Yet we hardly know about their lives, other than what the statistical data reflect and what was told about them by those who were in charge of their custody and care. The collective and individual image of these people was constructed through statistics as well as other people’s chronicles and was strongly conditioned by the difficulties in obtaining them and the interests of those who produced them. The objects, images and voices collected in this section bring us a little closer to those lives, their aspirations and frustrations, and the personal and collective struggles waged, in this case, by the inhabitants of Fontilles. You will hear their voices as they settle down next to a mesa camilla, just like the family tables over which photographs, papers and objects were scattered, igniting memories and unravelling life stories. You will learn about the long journey that took them from their birthplace to the sanatoriums where they were carried or where they arrived on their own, as Antonio did on his knife sharpening motorcycle, a symbol of the lost freedom. They are small objects loaded with stories, at times endowed with great power. Like the porcelain clay almond tree, moulded and painted in the workshop set up by Luci in the parlour. The trees and flowers transformed that old meeting place between the sick and their families into a gathering place for the women of Fontilles and those of the neighbouring villages who crossed the physical and symbolic wall of the sanatorium to share their art and experiences. Or like the television interview that Salvador gave to José María Íñigo to present himself to everyone and defend his people. They are fragments of the lives of people who were marked as different and sacrificed to protect them and protect us from an evil, long feared and incurable, from which, despite having been cured, they never completely managed to free themselves. As Carmen says in one of those stories, in the gaze of others, “having leprosy once makes you a leper for life”.
Interview of José María Íñigo with Salvador Trull on the program Fantástico, June 17, 1979. RTVE Archive, 2:23:51-2:40:60.
The Fontilles heritage recovery and enhancing project, which culminates in this exhibition, has made it possible to collect, digitalise and catalogue nearly 20,000 photographic images. The latter currently make up the Fontilles Photographic Collection which has been ceded to the Archivo de la Diputación de Alicante for conservation and consultation. The collection is unique in the field of leprosy sanatoriums around the world, both in terms of volume and time span. It is also exceptional regarding the wide range of topics addressed and techniques used. The collection illustrates a history of twentieth-century Spanish photography and traces the evolution of cameras, laboratory procedures and visual languages and styles, as well as helping to understand the construction of today’s image of leprosy. All the pictures are of a social nature and differ from the even larger clinical photography collection. A collection of this magnitude cannot be understood without recalling the urgent need that the Fontilles sanatorium had to publicise itself in order to obtain the public and private resources necessary to continue with its social, spiritual, and health work. The images served to illustrate the sanatorium’s magazine and journal and the news which periodically appeared in the local and national press. Pictures were equally used to design the posters and stands that the sanatorium presented at the national and international medical congresses in which it participated assiduously. The photographs projected in this exhibition were taken in the 1930s. They are a testimony to the sanatorium’s comprehensive reform efforts which were conducted by the medical team appointed by the government of the Second Republic, as evidenced by the small paper labels with the letterhead of the then “National Sanatorium of Fontilles,” still visible on many of the plaques. The registration number and the year of entry of the person photographed were written on them. They make up a collection of more than three hundred black and white photographs, mounted on glass plates with silver gelatine, possibly by a professional photographer – which would explain the quality of the images and the expressive power of the portraits.
Origins, loves, and returns. Portraits and voices of one thousand and one lives.
