A fotografía na revista VIDA GALLEGA. Un silandeiro universo de sentido
Until the beginning of the golden age of photojournalism (from the thirties of the twentieth century), press photography came to be historically conceived, either as an illustrative support for the texts, as a visual appeal that seeks sensationalism and spectacularization, or as a tool that enables the conversion of doctrinary journalism to information journalism, thanks to the denotative and descriptive capacity of that. However, the symbolic importance of photography in those first years of its use in the press has barely been analyzed.
From the study of the graphic discourse of Vida Gallega, main Galician graphic magazine of the first third of the 20th century, it is observed that it offers an idealized and interested vision both of the Galician society and of emigration to America (one of its main themes), and that uses photography in informative spaces as a promotional tool for representatives, businesses and commercial interests of the emerging bourgeoisie. This use of informative photography, not only to give an account of reality, but also as a promotional support, as a tool to build prominence and notoriety and as an interpreting and opinioner element under the pretext of photographic realism, became, with the passing of time, in one of the main symptoms of modernity.
At the expense of other case studies on the graphic discourse of journals that can confirm it, it is proposed that the role of photography in the first graphic magazines was more than illustrative, that there was “vida” before Life. And that was precisely in the informative graphic spaces of those where the massive excitement of the human visual drive that characterizes the current western society began.