Jacques Léonard is a photographer who has until recently been unjustly condemned to obscurity. Omitted from the main discourses of the history of photography in our country, his work has been overlooked despite the singularity and interest of his photographs. He worked as a photographer from 1952 until 1975 in Barcelona. Thanks to his marriage to Rosario, a Gypsy from the Amaya clan and well-known model of great beauty who sat for many of the painters of the time, he had access to the Gypsies in the city, especially the ones who lived in the shanty town on Montjuïc.
In 2009 the Barcelona Photographic Archive finalised the handover of Jacques Léonard's collection of 18,000 negatives, kept up until then by his sons Santi and Alex. However, what makes this collection especially interesting is a section of 3,000 negatives dealing with Gypsy life, making it the most significant collection of pictures of Gypsy culture, not just in terms of quantity but also of quality, from the last century.
In his photographs Léonard depicted how Gypsies lived, and he did so as an insider due to being one himself, not only through marriage, but being the son of a Gypsy father. Léonard gives us a view of Gypsies free of any hint of paternalism or condescension, he shows them with dignity, clearly aware that he is documenting a way of life that is heading for extinction. Unlike many of his fellow professionals, who worked from the other side of an imposed cultural boundary, he took his photographs from the point of view of being half Gypsy.
El Payo Chac, as he was known by the Gypsies, came to Barcelona in the 1940’s and met Francesc Català-Roca who gave him his first contacts and first work as a photographer. He made a living by covering the celebrations of moneyed families in Barcelona for the council magazine Sant Jordi, producing reports published in La Vanguardia, and doing photographic work for the Catalan Railways, in short, work very similar to that being done by his contemporaries.
But the life of Jacques Léonard is a series of stories and anecdotes more at home in an adventure novel. In a typewritten text preserved by his family, Léonard tells the tale of his eventful life, full of professional and personal experiences, showing him to be a man of boundless energy who wins us over thanks to his ability to adapt to and take on with enthusiasm each new challenge set by life.
Léonard was born in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. His father was a well-known horse dealer with a good eye for horse flesh and his mother was the owner of a maison de couture with a select clientele from the Parisian middle class. When he was a child he discovered, coming across a photograph of his father decked out as a Gypsy, his roots. This was to affect him deeply, and he spent much of his life piecing together his real identity.
His father lost a lung during the First World War, a serious debility that entailed a long convalescence. Wanting to aid a speedy recovery, Léonard’s mother rented a house in Pau where, once he was better, his father went back to dealing with horses with the help of a Gypsy family known as the Pacorros. Jacques was 10 years old and his father left him in charge of the property while he was away for long periods working for the French navy.
During this time, Jacques divided his time between going to school and rearing horses, with the help of the Pacorros, who recognised him as the son of the owner. This relationship was strained when he fell in love with Encarna, a teenage girl from the family. The situation caused the Pacorros to decide to move on (although nothing had happened between the young lovers). But young Jacques pursued them as far as Portugal, where a sister of the girl dissuaded him from continuing by attacking him with a knife. However, years later Jacques and Encarna met up again and had a fleeting but intense relationship.
Over time his father, with new business ventures, lost interest in the farm at Pau, and he was able to return to Paris where he started work as a film editor in the film industry. Two years later his father fell gravely ill and Jacques went back to Pau to say his last goodbyes. He also discovered on this trip that Cleo, a classmate of Cuban origins who he had planned to marry and had been exchanging passionate letters with, had married the local doctor and had had a child.
After the death of his father, Jacques and his mother sold the farm in Pau and, back in Paris, he threw himself into the film world where he began to be known for his professionality. The biggest directors of the day sought him out and he worked on numerous films that enabled him to travel to countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Libya. These were years of professional and economic fulfilment.
This was when one of the most surprising episodes of Jacques Léonard’s life took place; he married France, daughter of the film director Jean Choux. She was betrothed in marriage against her will and when he heard about it Léonard offered to take the fiancé’s place, an offer which was accepted by both the girl and her parents. But, as was to be expected, the marriage was not a happy one, except for when their son Marc was born in 1928, and Jacques alleviated the tedium of his married life by throwing himself into his work. Luckily things went well for Jacques in his professional life.
In 1940 he went to Spain as part of a crew making a film about the life of Christopher Columbus, and in Madrid he was received by Augusto García Viñolas, head of the governmental General Directorate of Film. The civil war had just ended in Spain and the film industry was seen as the perfect tool for taking people’s minds off their problems and transmitting a sense of normality. However, in Europe war had broken out again, leading to the film’s backers getting cold feet. So Léonard took up an offer from García Viñolas to work for Ulargui Films, and brought his wife and child to join him.
At Ulargui Films he worked as a film editor on various productions, including María de la O (filmed in 1936), where he discovered the exceptional dancer Carmen Amaya, to whom he would later be related after his marriage to Rosario. He also worked on the documentary Boda en Castilla, scripted and directed by García Viñolas, which won a prize at the 1942 Venice Biennale. He was then asked by García Viñolas to go to Portugal to work on a documentary produced by the Portuguese authorities, which led to further work and him extending his stay there to a year.
On his return to Madrid he discovered his wife had been unfaithful to him, and they got divorced. It was a long and painful process, but the thing that pained Léonard most was not seeing his son again. He decided to turn his back on film making and anything that could connect him with his ex-wife, and slowly drifted apart from his friends in Madrid, all of which, according to him, made his life difficult.
Until the theatre impresario Arthur Kaps, fleeing from Nazi occupation, arrived in the Spanish capital and asked him to join his company in Barcelona, where he was putting on a musical show on Avinguda Paral·lel. Léonard felt at ease in Barcelona, he liked the city and threw himself into his work. He then decided to work on the production of a musical film with the company, but the film's producer, who was not a film professional, pulled out of the project, leaving Léonard adrift.
To earn a living Léonard started working in a French antique dealer’s workshop, once again showing his resourcefulness, but his employer not paying him led once again to financial instability. Now it was Robert Lamouret, a ventriloquist and comedian acquaintance of his, who invited him to go on a tour of England, Australia, Greece and Italy. They became firm friends, but when Lamouret proposed extending the tour to the United States, Léonard declined the offer: he wanted to live in Barcelona and take up photography.
It was in Barcelona that Jacques Léonard met the love of his life; Rosario, a Gypsy from the Amaya family, whom he married. He now started on a personal project of raising awareness of the Gypsy people, of which he was one. And despite the fact that at this time things had changed for Gypsies and they did not live as he had known as a child, Léonard, with his camera, knew how to capture their essence.
He moved to Barcelona in 1952 and became a professional photographer, accepted by the Amaya family and the rest of the Gypsy community. All doors in the shanty town were open to El Payo Chac, a fact which gave him an edge over his fellow professionals. Also the fact of being foreign meant that he could distance himself from attitudes ingrained in his colleagues, so influenced by Franco's post-war Spain. Léonard dissociated himself from all official discourses: he was not looking to highlight elements of folklore, to provoke pity, or to take a political stance.
At this time changes were beginning to be seen in the photographic language of the day, promoted by photographers such as Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs and Colita, who took pictures which were ground-breaking and pioneering. They were pictures free of propaganda, better defined as realist, or even of a humanist nature. But Léonard also lived apart from this circle. He created freely, he was a foreigner and a Gypsy (he first lived in the shanty town on Montjuïc and later in La Mina), which meant he was immediately marginalised and condemned to obscurity. It is now vital that he is rescued from this obscurity, in order to review the official view of nations and make visible those who up until now have been overlooked.