Around 2003, Esteban Sáinz Vidal pulled negatives from different years in Piedad Isla’s archive and took them to the Centro de Documentación de la Imagen de Santander. The archive held more than 130,000 documents, including negatives. Isla had sorted her film rolls by assignment, with each village and year recorded. The images had a narrative force that surprised the foundation, its vice-president, Maxi Barrios, said.
That discovery lies basic to Piedad Isla revelada, a documentary in the Imprescindibles programme. RTVE made the film, created by journalist Laura García Rojas and director Juan Soria. It was filmed in Cervera de Pisuerga and nearby villages. The documentary revisits the work of a photographer and ethnographer who recorded rural life in the Montaña Palentina, though she remained little known beyond the region. Isla was born in Cervera de Pisuerga on 6 September 1926. She died in Madrid on 6 November 2009.
In 1953, Isla opened her own studio in Cervera de Pisuerga. She was among the first women in the region to make a living as an independent photographer. She worked professionally until retiring in 1992. Weddings and baptisms brought clients through the door. She also took passport photographs and studio portraits, then travelled by Vespa to document life in mountain villages. She kept her film rolls carefully. Each shoebox was marked with the village and year. European funding later enabled the archive’s digitisation, and the photographs reached a wider audience in 2005. The collection also holds Super 8 films. Isla wrote scripts and narrated some of them.
One set of photographs shows the huebra, the name for communal work in Palencia province. Other frames catch nuns throwing snowballs in a school courtyard. One picture captures Roque. Another shows a transhumant shepherd, unaware of the camera. Isla recorded village life, capturing religious occasions and pastoral scenes while documenting local customs. She called such moments the course of life, though she did not consider herself an artist.
The newly digitised images also changed how her work was viewed. In 2005, journalist Paco Alcántara and photographer Eduardo Margareto travelled to Cervera de Pisuerga to report on Isla’s ethnographic museum. They were covering objects she had collected on Vespa journeys around the mountain region. The photographs prompted a reassessment of Isla as a photographer. The following year, Explorafoto in Salamanca mounted the first large retrospective. It later travelled around Castilla y León. PhotoEspaña presented another retrospective dedicated to Isla in 2020. Her archive remains in Cervera de Pisuerga, without a complete scholarly catalogue.
Recognition in her own region came when Isla was 80, three years before her death. During the centenary of her birth, Cristina García Rodero, the first Spanish woman to join Agencia Magnum, credited Isla with opening a path for other women. Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, winner of the Premio Nacional de Fotografía 2015, has praised the humanist quality of her work. Marisa Flórez has pointed to the truth in the photographs. José Manuel Navia has highlighted Isla’s unconventional life: she wore trousers and travelled by Vespa. Isla also became the first woman councillor in her village.
Isla worked as a photojournalist, collaborating with Agencia EFE. She also worked with Diario Palentino and El Norte de Castilla. She defended the natural environment and heritage of the Montaña Palentina.
RTVE’s documentary includes previously unpublished footage from 1975, digitised for the film. It shows Isla as a young municipal councillor. A separate regional effort to bring a cultural figure into classrooms appears in a Rioja schools project about Rafael Azcona. Piedad Isla revelada airs Sunday at 21:30 on La 2.
