This exhibition pays tribute to the career of Gonzalo Juanes, the Asturian representative of the AFAL Group, the most important Spanish photography collective in the twentieth century. As part of the group, Juanes interacted with photographers like Oriol Maspons, Gabriel Cualladó and Carlos Pérez-Siquier, and always with the one closest to him, his fellow Asturian and lifelong friend Joaquín Rubio Camín.

Organised in four storeys, An Uncertain Light is the first major monographic show on the work of Juanes, a pioneer in the use of colour in documentary photography, who remained largely hidden and was only recognised later. It is also a timeless survey of the Asturian photographer’s life.

Juanes was born in Gijón in 1923, and after a brief stint in Madrid, in 1957 he had to move permanently back to his hometown, where he took portraits of his fellow Asturians, their everyday life, always in black and white in the quest for his own style in the reporting format, which he considered the best documentary way to record reality with emotion.
In the early 1960s, he tried out colour with the mythical Kodachrome film, and it ended up being a real discovery for him. Colour brought another register with reflective, meditative, lyrical images, and he decided to work on different series on Asturias, each with its own theme.

Yet one notable exception is the series he made on Calle Serrano in Madrid in 1965, his most famous and reproduced work, a grand urban portrait of the capital’s bourgeoisie.

The final stage of his oeuvre reflects his physical decline and isolation through landscapes and found objects, although he nonetheless still displays an extraordinarily poetic sensibility.