Who remembers Ruth Matilda Anderson. An American Photographer in Spain.

In the course of the research leading to Visions of Spain—the working title of a film about Valencian artists and their presence in the United States—I came across the name of Ruth Matilda Anderson.

The young American photographer worked for the Hispanic Society of America in New York and, over the course of more than a decade, photographed Galicia, Asturias, León, Andalucía, Castilla and Extremadura, accumulating thousands of negatives of markets and religious celebrations, trades, costumes, architecture and, above all, people.

At first, however, it wasn’t the scale of the enterprise that interested me. It was Anderson herself.

I tried to picture this young woman moving along the country roads and through the villages of Spain in the 1920s, negotiating portraits with people who, most likely, had never been photographed. There must have been something wonderfully incongruous about her arrival: a stranger with cumbersome photographic gear disrupting rural life in a country still struggling with industrialization and with the consequences of the Spanish-American War.

Anderson went twice to Spain. The first time she traveled with her father, Alfred Theodore Anderson, an accomplished photographer himself.

She reminded me of my grandaunt Cora, an amateur photographer in Buenos Aires in the early 1920s, also experimenting with portraits and domestic life. Her negatives are a useful reminder that a woman behind a camera was hardly unimaginable at the time, although Susan Sontag might argue that it depended on who was looking at the lady photographer, and where.

I mention Cora because she explains something about my initial reaction. At first I was drawn precisely to the fact that Anderson was a woman. I shouldn’t have been. I didn’t want to be. Nevertheless, I was. Then I began to wonder whether I was allowing that fact to obscure something considerably more interesting: her work.

There is much to say about Anderson’s subjects, and I suspect I will return to them in a future article. Meanwhile, looking at her photographs, I thought of something much closer to the research that had brought me to the Hispanic Society in the first place: Joaquín Sorolla.

Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society, had commissioned Sorolla in 1911 to create what became Vision of Spain—hence the provisional title of my film essay—fourteen monumental paintings for the Society’s new gallery in New York. In developing the murals, Sorolla traveled through Spain looking for landscapes, costumes, rituals and people. Huntington and Sorolla were attempting to preserve something they understood was disappearing. The paintings were made between 1912 and 1919.

A decade later, the Society was sending Anderson into many of those same landscapes.

The connection suddenly seemed obvious. Sorolla had gone into Spain looking. Anderson went into Spain looking. And a century later, for reasons of my own, I find myself doing much the same.

There are important differences, of course. Sorolla was gathering material for his canvases. Anderson was attempting a photographic record, a documentary of sorts. My purpose is slightly different, but not that far off. All three begin with the same idea: going somewhere, looking, documenting, showing and telling.

Sorolla carried sketchbooks. Anderson carried cameras, film and a tripod. I went with an iPhone 18 Pro Max in my pocket.

Movies already existed when Sorolla and Anderson undertook their journeys. Film was silent, but the world had already begun to move across the screen. Painting, photography and cinema occupied this peculiar moment together, each promising in its own way to preserve reality while inevitably transforming it.

Sorolla put Spain on paper and later translated it onto canvas. Anderson documented life in still images. And now, a century later, I am approaching some of those same places, hoping that the places themselves will reveal something about what has changed.

I had thought there was something rather original about retracing Sorolla’s journey through Spain in order to understand what he had seen.

Unbeknownst to me, Ruth Matilda Anderson got there before me.

I had intended to write an introduction to Anderson. For some reason I find myself drifting away from her, which may be appropriate. Research has a habit of doing that. You begin looking for one person and discover another connection, another trail, another pixel in the picture.

I know I will return to Anderson, her photographs and the people who looked back at her camera. Not because they need more attention from me. They have done perfectly well without it. I need more time with them, and eventually I will want to share what I find.

Perhaps from another coffee shop in Brooklyn, waiting for my next flight to Valencia. Or perhaps on my next trip to New York.