The world in a picture

Every picture, apart from the photographer’s intention, retains moments of life in specific environments, and provides snippets of biocultural and environmental aspects which hard to separate (species, age, gender, biodiversity sets, identity, nutrition, social gender and economic determiners, climate factors etc.).

The girl was photographed in the summer of 1926 in Val de San Lorenzo, during an artistic practice visit by students from the Escuela de Cerámica de la Moncloa (Madrid). The precariousness of life had led to a continuous fall in the village’s population over the 20^th century (1,700 inhabitants in 1900, 1,400 in 1926 and 529 at present). When the photo was taken, the population was much feminized due to selective men migration to America, where the situation was opposite. For example, in 1926, the center founded in Argentina by this Spanish immigrants from “Val de San Lorenzo’,  only had 18% of women members. Such centers, maintained both a strong identity and a close solidarity among members, to help each other in difficult situations.

The photographer’s aim is to focus our eyes on her beauty and intense look while she knits socks. The pretty, traditional earrings and necklace give her a touch of identity and distract attention from her worn clothes. Her day shirt, with little tears and a safety pin where buttons are missing, points to a fragile economy, typical of the family subsistence agriculture in which she lived. Her healthy look suggests an absence of serious nutritional deficiencies, but as we don’t know her age, height and weight, we can’t establish her exact nutritional state.

Her activity, knitting socks, informs us simultaneously of three complementary aspects: biodiversity management, climate and gender relationships. Girls started to take part at an early age in post-productive tasks linked to biodiversity management: they carded wool from the family sheep and made warm socks (no monetary cost) which is connected to the climate i.e. the cold winters of this area.  Biodiversity management has a clear gender component as it is the girls and women who carry out the tasks with wool, which combine and are complemented by others which are done by men. Shepherding was a task for girls and boys, only men sheared and only women carded by hand and wove socks and other garments; larger-scale spinning for other textile uses was carried out interchangeably by women and men, often while shepherding the flocks. The inhabitants of Val de San Lorenzo shared such situations with other local populations, but also kept up an artisan textile industry based on the family group, many of whose activities were carried out by women and men interchangeably.