Over the last thirty years, Clemente Bernad (Pamplona/Iruñea, 1963) has photographed major social and political crises in southern Europe. Despite the fact that his work adheres to the fundamental tenets of photojournalism, his images rarely appear in the media that generally feed on this genre. Rather, they are to be found in self-financed publications and in exhibitions in which the documentary nature characteristic of his work is in keeping with the practices of contemporary art. Hemendik Hurbil / Close Enough is the latest of the projects that he has given shape to, in this case in the form of a volume containing 470 images. In this book, Bernad has brought together one of the most exhaustive portrayals of the Basque conflict, featuring photographs taken between 1987 and 2018. The exhibition deriving from this project highlights the strongly empirical nature of this kind of photography for which the photographer must be at the scene of events, at those moments when violence suffers―as Bernad himself puts it―from a perverse viscosity.

Bernad’s depiction of the conflict spans the period between one photograph taken in 1987 in Pamplona/Iruñea and another from 4 May 2018 in Kanbo / Cambo-les-Bains, a moment that evokes the Arnaga Declaration certifying the final dissolution of ETA. Time flows between these two images in an anomalous manner. The sum of events provides no indication whatsoever that can help us intuit how near or far a solution to this conflict is, a conflict that blighted the Basque Country for decades. Hemendik Hurbil / Close Enough relies on a flow―one that is clearly intolerable―that blends acts of violence by the opposing sides. The images that spring from this history reject any position of cognitive privilege with regard to what is taking place. Bernad thus dismantles the frequently unquestioned correspondence between the photojournalistic narrative and the evolution of events, a critical trait that makes him an antiphotojournalist.