CurArte (1980-2020)

CurArte is my new book that expresses my personal recognition to the professionals who look after the health of others. Pandemics have shown the extent to which research and health are necessary for all and, above other priorities, there is no doubt that the dedication and heroism of the members of the health community has multiplied to the point of exhaustion.

High-risk working conditions, endless working hours, different strategies almost every day and dealing with a smiling face to convey empathy and tranquility to the patient. What less to document that effort!.

For four decades, since I photographed the conditions in which people lived in a psychiatric hospital, and until my last images in a nursing home affected by coronavirus, my passion has been to witness the efforts of professionals that leave all of it for others when it is most needed. I have tried to express these feelings through emotion.

Health workers who travel wherever necessary to alleviate the consequences of disasters, experts who work in hospitals or medical centers to provide adequate assistance, guardian angels who watch over us, because healing is an art as vocational as any other artistic manifestation.

CurArte contains a unique visual legacy: exploring with a camera a dimension reserved for professionals and patients, photographs in the intimacy of healing. It is an unrepeatable book with images that reveal stories of love, generosity, heroism and improvisation. From the most advanced technological advances, to surgical interventions lighting an operating room with a simple mobile phone.

In the words of Jordi Rovira, author of the CurArte foreword and who has worked with me on many occasions: "The photographs show us the different facets of a world where pain, joy, sadness and fear of illnesses are mixed. They become vulnerable beings. Because, we have to admit it, medicine is not a pleasant or easy field. Proof of this is that there are many people who prefer to live backwards to all that. There are even those who feel anxiety just by approaching a hospital. In the way that Covid-19 has evidenced. We have needed a damn virus to understand, in all its magnitude, the importance of the medicine that Tino has portrayed so well. This is why this book is so important"

This is a tribute to forty years of Spanish healthcare, which was one of the most acclaimed models in the world, which I have had the perseverance to photograph throughout my long professional career.