Titles
- Los Modlin
Los Modlin (The Modlins), four-colour print
This is the story of the eccentric American Modlin family: Margaret, an obsessive painter; Elmer, an actor, and Nelson, the couple’s first born, model, actor, and radio host. In the 1970s, the family settled in Madrid; the last family member died in 2003. Afterwards, all their belongings were thrown out of the window of their house in 3 Calle del Pez. The remains were left lying on the pavement, among them clothes, cards, paintings, and hundreds of photographs and films showing the three Modlins in incomprehensible scenes.
There, on this pavement, the photographer Paco Gómez got to know this strange family. Thus, his obsession started. Because when he saw these pictures, he asked himself: “Who were these people?” And more important: “How come that all this is to be thrown away?”
For ten years, Gómez tried to reconstruct and explore the history of the Modlin family. He interviewed everyone who had been related to them, visited the places they had, watched hundreds of films in which Elmer had featured, studied the oeuvre of Margaret Modlin, and explored the ruin that had once been their home.
The Modlin family was elegant and without doubt eccentric. In one photograph, we see the naked father showing his underpants full of holes, in another one the son, an adonis with an aristocratic demeanour, in still another one the mother, haughtily drawing a portrait of Franco.
Paco Gómez shows us the biography of this strange and mysterious family, thus immortalising them for posterity, just as they always had wished for. This unusual book is half literature and half photography. As a result, we get a story that we read while we look – or we see while we read.
Spain: Fracaso Books, 2013
