Photo-Collages of Jose Val del Omar (1904 - 1982)

Primarily known as an experimental filmmaker & as friend/Spanish Civil War comrade to the great poet Frederico Garcia Lorca, Jose Val del Omar was also a rigorous political & artistic theorist, photographer, inventor, essayist, educator, historian & revolutionary. Though his two most famous films, Fuego en Castilla & Acarino Galaico   seemed ecstatic & nearly Gothic in terms of imagery, beneath the cryptic, eerily-charged surfaces lurked dozens of dazzling technical advancements in sound, lighting, editing & what he called PLAT ("Picto-Luminic-Audio-Tactile" art) that would later be implemented by hundreds of better-known experimental filmmakers, including Walt Disney, who was fascinated by the Spanish filmmaker's "apanoramic overflow of the image" & theories of "tactile vision". Here is a sampling of his photo-collage work, some constructed for magazines & journals, others as "sketchbooks" for future film projects.