Guillem Bestard And Mallorca's Early Photography

Pollensa town hall is to spend 277,500 euros on a collection of photos. This isn't any old collection. It is one that will be bought so that it remains the property of the people of Pollensa. It is the Bestard archive, one of the most famous and most important of all photographic collections in Mallorca.

The town hall will make four separate and equal payments over four years. In return, it will receive part of the collection every three months. The photos will be catalogued and stored in Can Llobera, the family home of the Pollensa poet Miquel Costa i Llobera. Eventually, there will be a room at the Pollensa Museum which will be used for a permanent exhibition. There would need to be a fair amount of space, if they were to in fact display the whole collection at one time. The exact number of photos isn't known for sure, but it is believed to be as many 400,000: they were taken over a period of one hundred years by three different generations.

The decision to purchase the collection was made at last week's council meeting. At that meeting it was also agreed to start the procedure by which Guillem Bestard will be named an illustrious son of Pollensa. It was Guillem who started it all off. The year was 1898.

The Bestard family ran an inn. A German painter came to Pollensa in 1898 and stayed at the inn. Guillem was seventeen; the painter introduced him to the camera. The rest was history that endured until 2006, and it is a history that has acquired a worth of more than a quarter of a million euros. While one might sometimes question town hall spending, there surely cannot be any criticism of this investment: one of the most remarkable archives that reveals Mallorca from the start of the last century.

The name Bestard can often be found on old photos of Mallorca. The majority of the photos that Guillem took in the early years were landscapes and scenes of fishing villages, such as his own - Puerto Pollensa. But he had a broader scope. He photographed Antoni Maura in 1910. Maura was the first and only Mallorcan to have been the prime minister of Spain.

His fame spread beyond Mallorca. His work was used for the Madrid daily newspaper El Sol. It was also featured in National Geographic. He received the gold medal for artistic photography at the international exhibition in Paris of 1910; other awards were to follow.

The early work in the Bestard archive is one of only a handful of collections to have survived. Another is that of Josep Truyol. While renowned as a photographer, Truyol had another claim to fame: he was one of the pioneers of film in Mallorca, if not the pioneer.

The claim to having been Mallorca's first photographer is somewhat disputed. One name who stands out in this regard was a Frenchman - Jules Virenque Chastain. He came to Mallorca in 1855. Three years later, he married Francesca Simó. The couple opened a photographic studio in Palma. Virenque was to become friendly with the Austrian Archduke Louis Salvador. His photos were to form the basis of illustrations in the Archduke's master work, Die Balearen. There is one very famous photo of the Archduke and family. The precise year is unclear, but Virenque died in 1876; the Archduke had arrived in Mallorca nine years earlier.

The Welsh photographer Charles Clifford, whose career as a photographer was developed in Spain, took photos of Queen Isabel II when she visited Mallorca in 1860. The official album of that visit is in the safekeeping of Palma town hall.

Then there was also one Francisco Muntaner Llampayes. He was from a family of engravers based in Palma and he collaborated with an industrialist and intellectual, Bartolomé Sureda, and Pere d'Alcàntara Penya, who nowadays has fame as the writer of the Sa Colcada poem that it is recited every New Year's Eve to mark the conquest of Jaume I in 1229.

Anyway, it would seem that Muntaner began using collotype (invented by the Frenchman Alphonse Louis Poitevin in 1856) for works by Sureda and Alcàntara Penya, which appeared in the first travel guide to the Balearic Islands. Muntaner wasn't really a photographer; he sought ways to improve other processes. But in some circles he is described as Mallorca's first photographer. Whether he was or he wasn't, he helped pave the way for those who were to follow, such as Guillem Bestard.

Photos Of Pollensa: Guillem Bestard

There is a black-and-white photo of Cala San Vicente rock and cliff formations that dates back to 1930. The photo was part of a series that the national tourism directorate commissioned between 1928 and 1936 and which is called the "Catálogo Monumental de España". The catalogue comprises 3,861 photographs of different places in Spain, all of them related to tourism. It, in turn, forms part of the national tourism patronage series - a colossal archive of posters, brochures, leaflets and photos. It has over 80,000 photos in all.

The Cala San Vicente photo is notable as much for its quality as it is for the name of the photographer. No photographic record of Cala San Vicente, of Pollensa, of Mallorca would be complete without works by Guillem Bestard. Find an old photo of Pollensa, Alcúdia, Sa Pobla, and the chances are that Bestard's name will be on it. He didn't confine himself to Pollensa and the surrounding area - he photographed the whole of the island - but he specialised in Pollensa, and his name is intrinsically linked to the town, and in more ways than you might imagine.

Guillem, or Guillermo if you prefer, got the photography bug when a German painter turned up in Pollensa in 1898. He was seventeen years old at the time. The Bestard family home was also an inn, and this painter was one of its guests. He introduced Guillem to the camera, and an astonishing legacy was about to be created.

His success as a photographer was not confined to taking photos of landscapes, of fishing villages and towns - ones with which many of you may well be familiar. He also did photographic portraits. The Infanta Isabel was one of his subjects in 1913. Two years before, he had photographed Antoni Maura, the Mallorcan who was prime minister of Spain on several occasions. Barely ten years after having picked up a camera, he received the gold medal for artistic photography at the international exhibition in Paris of 1910. Two years later, he received another international award in Paris and a couple more besides - in Brussels and Barcelona. He also photographed ordinary people. The Bestard archive is an indispensable record of Mallorca at the turn of the twentieth century and was, through successors, to become a record of the island until 2006.

Important though Bestard was, his photographic work was largely overlooked when it came to the promotion of Mallorca in the early years of the last century. Indeed, photography was generally not used; paintings were instead. But paintings, or rather painters - and it is here that the Bestard story begins to broaden - were to prove to be as much a part of the making of Bestard as his photographs.

In the 6 September, 1913 edition of the Mallorcan "La Almudaina" newspaper, there was an article entitled "Illustrious painters, today's guests in Mallorca". The article was subtitled "The Mecca for artists". The writer of the article was Pedro Ferrer Gibert. Three years later, it was he who was to coin the term "the Pollensa school", something which didn't physically exist but which was founded as an artistic movement around the time that the article appeared. (1914 is usually taken as the starting-point.)

Ferrer had taken himself off to Cala San Vicente, to the improvised Can Niu pension that was home to several of these "guests". He was accompanied by two painters - Antoni Gelabert and José Singala - and by a photographer, Guillem Bestard. There is a photo of these painters, fifteen of them in all. They are all smartly dressed. Had they put on their best bib 'n' tucker for Bestard's photo in the newspaper? Quite possibly. Though it isn't certain that this was a photo taken at that time, one presumes that it was.

Bestard was thus drawn into this artistic movement, one of which one can say, with no exaggeration, that it was fundamental in informing the world about Mallorca and in revealing to the world the magnificence of the island: the "island of calm", as one of these painters, Santiago Rusiñol, dubbed it.

His fame and reputation spread. Though photography might not have been used by the Mallorca Tourist Board at that time, his work still reached a wide audience. It was published in the Madrid daily "El Sol" but more significantly in "National Geographic", which proves that Bestard's role in the early years of promoting Mallorca's tourism, generally ignored, was of considerable importance.

In Pollensa, he became a pillar of local society. He co-founded the cultural Club Pollença in 1913 and became a director of the Colonya co-operative bank. He was, therefore, a close associate of Guillem Cifre de Colonya, someone with whom he shared liberal ideas. These ideas led him to leave Mallorca during the Civil War. He was later to return, but he lived primarily in London, where he died in 1969.