Una Historia de Amor by mara catalán

Public Project

Una Historia de Amor

Copyright mara catalán 2025

Updated Jul 2025

Location Array

Summary

Born in Spain and raised in a family devoted to preserving oral traditions, I grew up immersed in the Romancero español, traveling with my father through remote villages. In 2023, to honor the 150th anniversary of my great-grandmother María Goyri’s birth, I retraced her 1900 honeymoon with Ramón Menéndez Pidal along El Cid’s exile route in Soria, guided by her letters and maps. This journey evolved into a meditation on heritage, memory, and identity, reconnecting me with Spain and exploring an intergenerational love story through photography, letters, and landscapes.

From Spain to New York, my life has been a journey between worlds, between stories, and between images. As a photographer, labor organizer, and bookmaker, I have devoted my life to capturing the essence of life through the lens of my camera. I was born in Spain, where my roots in photography were deeply intertwined with my family history. That’s why my photography became much more than simple images — it became a reflection of my thoughts, a chronicle of my journey through time and space, a story told with every click of the shutter. I grew up surrounded by the manuscripts of the Spanish Romancero, a legacy my family helped create, which taught me the value of every story, every image, every moment in its time. My fascination with photography began in childhood, when I accompanied my father, Diego Catalán, on his trips through the most remote corners of Spain in search of traditional ballads. There, among the whispers of ancient tales, I found my voice and my purpose. On those trips, I developed my love for travel and my interest in discovering the world through the people I met, their traditions, and customs. Photography allowed me to pursue that curiosity — to observe and reflect on what surrounded me. My photos became part diary, part autobiography, and part documentary. That’s why my photography became much more than simple images — it became a reflection of my thoughts, a chronicle of my journey through time and space, a story that tells itself with each click of the shutter. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of María Goyri, I decided to honor her life with this photographic project based on a love story — her honeymoon: a journey taken in 1900, when, newly married, she and her husband decided to follow the path that El Cid Campeador took during his exile, as described in the anonymous 12th-century epic manuscript that both my great-grandparents studied in depth. I began my own journey on January 10, 2023, in the middle of winter. Cold and windy, I knew it wasn’t the best month to travel through Soria and its surroundings. I had to let go of the idea of walking through some of the remote villages mentioned in the letters or traveling part of the way by donkey, as I had originally planned (my great-grandparents traveled part of the route on donkey back). Life and ideal circumstances don’t always go hand in hand, so I had to adapt to what I had. I realized that taking this initial trip was a necessary step in my quest to connect with my ancestors. It gave me the opportunity to gain a first glimpse of the key places my great-grandparents had visited — places that would so deeply shape my family’s academic destiny and lead to the creation of the Romancero RMP archive. With copies of the letters María wrote to her mother Amalia during the honeymoon in hand, I unintentionally had a profound and transformative experience. Not only could I imagine the newlyweds walking through these lands in 1900, but as I crossed what are now deserted landscapes, I also imagined the battles and journeys of El Cid during his exile, desperately trying to win back the favor of his king. This intersection of worlds and times made me feel that this love story was becoming something much greater. On this journey through Spain, I found a path back to my origins. There I was, back in a land that, since childhood and through my father, had been the starting point of all my journeys — seeing it for the first time in 30 years as a place I belong to, and finding my roots in these winter-barren landscapes. That’s why the images presented here tell the love story of many generations.

mara catalán

Also by mara catalán —

In a mother's eye

Less is More

Say..."silly". How a NYC school portrait photographer found safe heavens while working in and around the school grounds during Covid times..

The art of portraiture using my rollei around the world.

Postcards from New York

Raicing with the wind

Artist shaking the streets of Williamsburg and beyond

The Rockaways celebrates the 4th of July

New York is Dead

Chicken Skin: A subconscious ballad by Mara Catalan

High Voltage

Williamsburg in the 1990's

The trunk: en claro_oscuro

La realidad La Otra Cara de un Pueblo Zapatista