Society of Fellows scholar Arnau Sala Sallent presented at the September 25, 2026 symposium at the Hispanic Society of America, Art and Atrocity in Goya's Prints. His talk, "Colonial Desastres: Goya, Morocco, and the Photojournalism of War," examined how Alfonso Sánchez Portela’s 1920s war photography reactivates Goya’s anti-heroic visual language while resisting its nationalist appropriation.

Talk Abstract

Francisco de Goya’s Los Desastres de la guerra broke decisively with heroic conventions of military representation by confronting viewers with mutilated bodies, unceremonious burials, and violence against civilians. A century later, Spain faced the collapse of its empire in Cuba and the Philippines—the Desastre of 1898—while embarking on a new colonial project in North Africa that produced further military catastrophes. The most notorious of these, the so-called Desastre de Annual of 1921, resulted in the deaths of more than 10,000 Spanish soldiers. This paper examines the legacy of Goya’s visual language in representations of imperial collapse, tracing the afterlife of the Desastres de la guerra in photojournalistic coverage of Spain’s colonial war in Morocco.

Following the defeat at Annual in July 1921, photojournalists working in Morocco, including Alfonso Sánchez Portela, documented the Spanish army’s recapture of positions such as Monte Arruit, where the mutilated and unburied bodies of Spanish soldiers were discovered in a mummified state. The brutality of these scenes led contemporary press commentators to describe them as goyescas. Yet the illustrated magazines that circulated such photographs among Spanish readers—publications including La Esfera, Mundo Gráfico, and Blanco y Negro—simultaneously sought to monumentalize the dead and incorporate colonial defeat into a narrative of patriotic sacrifice. I argue that Sánchez Portela’s photographs of corpses, onlookers, and burial scenes reactivate Goya’s anti-heroic visual language while resisting its nationalist appropriation. In doing so, they expose the uneasy relationship between documentation and spectacle, interrogate the ethics of representing colonial violence, and complicate photography’s claims to indexical truth by drawing attention to the staging and artifice involved in producing images of war.