Marqués de Santa María del Villar

Viavélez (Asturias), 1938. Picture for the Ministerio de Interior (1938-1939)

Diego Quiroga y Losada, Marqués de Santa María del Villar, (Marquess of Santa María del Villar), was born in Madrid in 1880 and died in San Sebastián in 1976. He took pictures of many places of Spain, its landscapes, monuments and people.

Biography

He started his work in the early 20th century and ended in the 1960s. Because he belonged to the nobility, he was closed to Alfonso XIII, king of Spain. He took pictures of the daily work of the king and he also took photos when the king was doing some sport (hunting). He was asked to be the president of the National Patronage of Tourism, but he did not accept this post. However, his photos represented the same image of Spain as the kind of images encouraged by the National Patronage. His pictures were published in magazines and newspapers like Blanco y Negro, Vértice and Trenes.

Before the Spanish Civil War (1936), he had more than 120,000 photographs, but many of them were destroyed during this war.

His photographic style was pictorialism, but lately he changed to documental and ethnographic photography in order to show the way Spain looked like after the war. Most of his collection is in the Archivo Real y General de Navarra in Pamplona, which held several exhibitions of his work.

He was also founder of photographic societies in Madrid and Guipúzcoa.

References

• El fotógrafo Santa María del Villar, by Jorge Latorre
• Summa Artis XLVII
• Del Daguerrotipo a la instamatic, by Juan Miguel Sanchez Vigil

External links

• Archivo General de la Administración
• Pictures of the Ministerio de Interior (1938-1939)
• Photolibrary of the Archivo general de Navarra (Including Marquess personal collection)

Persondata
Name	Santa Maria Del Villar, Marques
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1880
Place of birth
Date of death	1976
Place of death