Presentation of documentary : Las dos guerras del fotógrafo Boix (The two wars of the photographer Boix)

Presentation of the documentary “Las dos guerras del fotógrafo Boix” (RTVE, 2015).

Saturday, January 20, 2018, at 11 a.m.

Pedagogical classroom of the MUME

The documentary "Las dos guerras del fotógrafo Boix" (2015), which reveals the importance of Francesc Boix's work in the Nuremberg trials and reveals an unpublished collection of photographs from the Spanish Civil War by Boix. This is the conclusion reached by a group of researchers who have worked on a recovered photographic background in a market in the south of France. Boix is ​​known to have mounted a string of negative robberies at the Nazi extermination camp at Mauthausen. Part of the stolen clichés turned into incriminating evidence against the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. He was the only Spaniard to appear as a witness before the Nuremberg International Tribunal, where he showed some of these graphic documents stolen in the extermination camp, in which more than 7,000 Spanish republicans were deported during World War II. .

The researchers, belonging to the associations 'Dignity Commission' and 'Photoconnection', established the authorship of half of the photographic collection. The documentation work on the author culminated in a calligraphic test, in which the experts concluded that the handwritten notes bearing the envelopes of some negatives had been written by Boix. In this examination the calligraphers distinguished a second person who could be his father, Bartolomé Boix, who introduced his son to the world of photography.

The photographic collection related to the Spanish Civil War captures scenes of the republican front of Aragon and the Segre front, in 1938. Boix was 17 years old and moved to France in early 1939. As thousands of Republican refugees he was interned in a concentration camp by the French authorities. The researchers hypothesized that the photographer undid or lost the negatives in one of the camps where he was interned.

Jordi Font, Director of the MUME, Josep Cruanyes, of the Dignity Commission and Ramon Barnadas and Ricard Marco, of the Photoconnection Association, will take part.

This event is linked to the temporary exhibition "The first shots of Francesc Boix", which can be visited at the MUME from December 16, 2017 to February 11, 2018.