The press photography of Isabel Azkarate: Images from the 1980s in the Basque Country

Abstract

Isabel Azkarate (born in 1950 in San Sebastián) is recognized as the first woman photojournalist from the Basque Country. Between 1983 and 1985, she worked as a graphic reporter for the newspaper  La Voz de Euskadi. It was during this period known as the ‘years of lead’ in the Basque Country that she published a large part of her photojournalistic work. This paper explores her more photojournalistic work, specifically focusing on a retrospective approach to the press photographs published in the aforementioned newspaper, which is only a part of her extensive corpus. First, it narrows a search in the digital archives of the Basque press to those images attributed to Azkarate in order to quantify those images and identify key themes in her photographic corpus. Second, this work carries out a descriptive-interpretive analysis of a case study as a sample of her work: the photographic report in the prison of Martutene. This section focuses on deciphering photographs that she captured with her camera, including portraits of anonymous subjects from the margins, often excluded in the social imaginary. In addition, the testimony of Isabel Azkarate herself has been included so that this work encompasses an account of her experience in this profession, as well as her role as a pioneering woman working in a male-dominated field. The analysis shows that these images captured through Azkarate's lens are not merely records of current events of the time but also serve as documentary sources for memory, recognizing the central role of subaltern groups within the historiographical account.